Good as Tech-Ed was, this is one thing that I was a little disappointed by and thats the "Ask the Experts" stand. At first sight it looks promising - lots of Microsoft staff, mini white-boards and plenty of discussion. Unfortunately the reality isn't quite the same - most of the Microsoft staff are deep in conversation with each other and when you do manage to ask a question the answer is less than satisfactory.

Maybe I'm asking the wrong questions but I get the impression that the people staffing the stand are marketing personnel because their knowledge doesn't seem to run very deep. I was ready for a good conversation about threading models and scalability of Reporting Services but the person I spoke to fell at the first hurdle. He didn't think anyone else at the stand would be able to help either and gave me an e-mail address with a promise to find the answer I was looking for.

The same thing happened in Barcelona last year so my advice to Microsoft for next year is to ship some developers out from Redmond and not use marketing and support staff from the UK.