So I've been to three and a half sessions plus a keynote on day one at MS Tech Ed.

The first couple of sessions were on the Visual Studio Team System which is coming out in the next release of VS. It was pretty impressive (although obviously still alpha quality.) If you've used the whole Rational tool suite you'd find it fairly similar but possibly better integrated. The presenter empahsised that it will cost a lot mroe than VS2003 Architect, though (I suspect it will still be less that Rational)

The guy doing the demo knew the competition, too – he mentioned Eclipse a couple of time.

MS needs to release VS2005 pretty quickly, though – people were still impressed by the “Create Method Stub” and refactoring (which IDEA & Eclipse users have had for a couple of years. I've been doing C# in VS2003 a bit lately, and I really, really miss refactoing support (and yes, I know about Refactory but haven't tried it yet)

The third session was on SOA and was pretty interesting. The presenter talked about various strategies for migrating to SOA, and spoke a lot about breaking up applications into smaller parts which could be addressed as services. I found that pretty useful, and would have liked to talk more about that.