TechEds everywhere are exciting events full of great speakers wanting to give their best and deliver presentations that everyone will talk about. I recently spoke at TechEd Developers 2006 in Barcelona and the quality of presenters was excellent. The top speaker (based on "overall quality of the session") was Anders Hejlsberg with one of his LINQ presentations. To say that this was a big surprise would be very misleading. Anders is a great speaker and obviously has some great subjects to deliver information on. The surprise is that Rafal Lukawiecki didn’t win. Rafal is a phenominal speaker. Really. If you ever get the chance to see him speak you should leap at it if only to see just how good a speaker can be. I feel priviledged that I have witnessed 3 of what I would consider "perfect" presentations (and bear in mind that before I saw my first "perfect" presentation I didn’t think it was possible to be "perfect") - Rafal’s was one of them. Instead Rafal came second. By 0.01. He did, however, beat Anders on "Speaker’s knowledge of the subject"! Anders also got the third and fourth best sessions with Rafal getting the sixth followed by Kate Gregory, Kimberly Tripp and Jeff Prosise.

It was my first TechEd so my "better than average" position of 88 out of 190 is ok but "must try harder". I hope to come back next year older and wiser. Or maybe just wiser.