One thing I wanted to bring up if you've never been to Tech Ed before is the great experience that the Hands on Labs (HOLs) provided. Basically, you walked up to the HOL computer and, in a few short steps, you had a full development virtual machine ready to go. It was a really nice experience and ensured that you could try out new features without having to set up your own VM or worse, download and install a lot of betas on your own development machine.