With Tech-Ed 2009 arround the corner I am extremely proud to announce that Dave Coates, the Port Elizabeth community lead has taken on the challenge to run and manage the 2009 Community Lounge. Dave will be managing one of the most exciting parts of the Tech-Ed event.

Tech-Ed Online contains video interviews with key speakers and visitors of Tech-Ed. Currently the South African interviews are available for download from the MSDN site. This year quite a few of the local bloggers and community members featured in these interview.

At Tech-Ed 2008 I had the opportunity of presenting a talk on Developing for Windows Mobile targeting the new and extensive feature list in Windows Mobile 6.1. This was my first official talk for Microsoft and I was extremely satisfied with the outcome and thankful for the opportunity.

Hosting Community Lounge at Tech-Ed is no simple task, and a few people from the industry and the community deserves a huge amount of credit with their help and assistance at the lounge this year.

DevDays 2008 was a huge success and I was extremely glad to have the support of so many people at the community lounge. It was a busy 3 days with more people then we ever imagined but the exposure was amazing.

We are in the middle of planning for Tech-Ed 2008 and this year the communities are high on the agenda with the biggest ever community lounge planned. Please join us at the Durban ICC for 3 days of technology and information sharing brought by some of the industries best.

The move to IT Intellect prooved to be a big adjustment for me, and I am more and more involved with Microsoft and the community. However it is sometimes draining and I seem to be struggling to the adjustment harder then I expected.

Overall overview on Tech-Ed 2007 held at Sun City. The event was packed with 2000 attendees and the speakers and sessions where filled with an amazing array of new information from the Microsoft Stable.