MS TechEd

From June 11, 1996, until June 14, the Microsoft TechEd roadshowhits the fashionable French Riviera. TechEd '96 for the European developercommunity will be at the Nice Acropolis in Nice.

Near Cannes, St. Tropez, and of course, Monaco, this site promises to taxthe wallet of even the hardiest developer--and a glance at the prices Microsoftare charging for attendance shows that the wallet will take a fair old beatingeven be-fore you get there. Prices on the French Riviera are never cheap at thebest of times, and the beginning of summer is certainly not the best of times.But quite frankly, I'm not entirely sure just how this event can cost almosttwice as much to attend as Jon Honeyball and I just paid to go to the Internetdeveloper conference in San Francisco. But, there you go. Inflation must berampant...well, something surely is.

Let's hope that the conference is an improvement on last year's effort inHamburg. The problem there was language. For some reason, someone decided that,in the main, representatives of Microsoft Germany should give the talks--inEnglish. This must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but this plan sadlymisfired. Unless you happen to be a superb linguist, you will always haveproblems talking on technical subjects in anything but your native tongue. Thepoor unfortunates who had to deliver some of these sessions were often quitelost for the right word. The audience were having some difficulty in followingwhat was going on: The translators were having to interpret poor English forpeople who had headsets for precisely the reason that they didn't speak English.

Worse still, the German attendees at this German-hosted conference found itdifficult to understand why speakers from Microsoft Germany were speaking in badEnglish, which was then being translated back to incomprehensible German! Theresult was that everyone suffered. So it is to be hoped that this linguisticconfusion will not happen this year.

It is also to be hoped that there is a levelling out of just whatconstitutes advanced, when that word is at the front of a conferencesession title. Jon and I walked into an "advanced" session on databaseconstruction, as I recall. We were not impressed to hear the presenter start onabout how tables had useful things called records and fields. I had alwaysassumed that this usage problem had something to do with the American idea ofwhat constituted "advanced." But I know this is not the case, havingattended advanced sessions at US conferences that left my head reeling. Soperhaps this session's level was just a momentary aberration. Let us hope so.Certainly, the topics of interest at this year's European TechEd--the Internet,intranets, and the whole slew of tools and components that Microsoft has andwill have by the end of the year--should more than compensate for the conferencepricing, as long as TechEd gets as professional a set of presenters as we had inSan Francisco.