I'm not (just noticed that typo!! It was supposed to be "now") at Tech Ed in Los Angeles where I will be presenting two Entity Framework sessions this week. Even though it's obvious that the economy has had an impact on the conference, it is still a fabulous event to be attending.

If you are not here, you can tap in at Tech Ed Online .

Chris Love and friends have re-created the NotAtPDC website with a new NotAtTechEd site. This is not Tech Ed content, but a community parallel - all online.

Being a geek, I love looking at some of the stats on Tech Ed.

People are still talking about my discovery a number of years ago that there were more speakers named Brian than there were women speakers. This year there are 8 Brians. It's hard to go through the list and pick out every female speaker but I can list 8 off the top of my head (myself, Kate Gregory, Michele Leroux Bustamante, Deborah Kurata, Emily Freet, Sara Ford, Constanze Roman and Rhonda Layfield (winner of Speaker Idol US and EMEA in 2008). And there are plenty more. I believe that the year of the Brians had 11 Brians and there are easily more than 11 women speaking at Tech Ed this year.

Over all there are just over 800 sessions.

Regular breakouts: 439
Interactive Theater sessions: 86 (I'm doing one of these and it will be a lot of fun)
Birds of a Feather: 36
Hands on Labs: 213 (these are counted as sessions)
Panel Discussions: 16
Pre-Con workshops : 15

This year, Microsoft will not waste resources producing and mailing DVDs of the session. Instead they will eventually all be available online. There is an internal Tech Ed website for registered attendees where the sessions will be available shortly after (24 hours) the session is completed. After Tech Ed, the sessions will be pushed to the TechEd Online website so everyone can watch them.

My job at Tech Ed is to do a great job on my presentations, but the most fun part for me is to hang around the community areas and talk with people. I got a great preview of Ward Bell's Prism presentation which I won't be able to see since I am flying home on Friday. I think he was happy to have a quick run through with an objective observer, too!

Perhaps I will find some willing guinea pig for my Tips & Tricks session.

My friend (and roommate for the week), Paula Januszkiewicz has recommended going to at least one session that is 100% out of your area of interest/expertise so that you can learn something completely new. Paula's a security expert (working in the Ask the Experts area this week) so maybe she'll go to a developer session. I like that idea so will pick something to attend perhaps in an IT Pro track.