TechEd 2008 North America DVD Update

Thanks for all the feedback on the TechEd North America DVD issues with viewing the content once Silverlight 2 released.  In trying to do a good job providing a good user experience to viewing the content easily, the TechEd team created a Silverlight 2 Beta 2 player for the TechEd Online site as well as the offline DVD content.

Obviously, when Silverlight 2 released and people installed the final version on their machines, the DVD Silverlight player stopped working and presented you with an “Install Silverlight” badge.  This was, of course, due to the use of Beta 2.  This doesn’t render the DVD set useless as the content is still there, but you just aren’t able to use the Silverlight player from the DVD.

The team has updated the player in the online version of the content already.  Unfortunately you can’t service burned DVDs (aside from burning new sets and sending them to the thousands of people, which isn’t efficient, cost effective or environmentally friendly), but we can help you understand the maze of content folders.  We’ve finalized the document that maps out where the content files are as well as providing you with a “content map” of the codes to the session descriptions and the speakers who delivered the sessions.  This list was made based on your feedback and the team tried to include as much information as they could to make it easy to discover.  You can download a PDF copy of this content map here: TechEd 2008 North America DVD content map.

I’ve also taken the liberty to make a quick Silverlight application to help you do some quick filtering of the data.  It’s uploaded into Silverlight Streaming so you can embed it into your site or as well into your Intranet if your employees or others in your organization are needing to navigate the DVD set as well.  You can select which conference (Developer or IT) and also type some filter in there that will search the speaker/title and filter it down.

In hindsight, choosing to burn a copy of a Beta 2 application to a distributable disc was not a good idea.  We admit that and apologize.  Hopefully you can see that the content is the king here and that is not lost or unusable.  Thanks for your patience while we created the content map based on your feedback!