Another attendee echoed that multi-core application development was a future concern.

"That's something we'll be looking at in the future," said Matthew Hartle, business applications project leader at Tenaris. "Obviously, you're going to get gains in the performance of your application by making use of the hardware."

At RedGear Technologies, the company expects to utilize services to help with performance. "I think what we're going to do is putting services on the Web," and do heavy-duty processing that way, said attendee Gary Mortensen, senior software engineer for RedGear.

Also at the conference, Microsoft scheduled sessions to help Visual Basic 6 users migrate their applications to Visual Basic.Net. Visual Basic 6 lacks the managed code capabilities of .Net, but there are still applications in use that are based on Visual Basic 6.

Microsoft's Dave Mendlen, director of developer tools marketing, said the company is seeing fewer and fewer Visual Basic 6 developers at TechEd. But these developers could be found at the event.

"I think [Visual Basic 6] is a huge issue still," said Matt Warner, software engineer at RedGear. From his perspective, "the industry is kind of ignoring the fact that there are many, many apps still in VB6."

"Right now, we're moving to .Net," he said. Migrating involves more than writing a user control and moving to the .Net side, said Wartner.

Warner, though, likes .Net. "It's so much more powerful than VB6," offering such advantages as XML capabilities. "There's really no comparison in my mind."

Hartle is another Visual Basic 6 user who supports .Net, which he says offers tremendous benefits. "It's much easier to work with data." He said.

"In VB6, working with XML is very complicated," said Hartle. Interop objects technology is available to help migrate to .Net, he said.

Attendees also offered perspectives on the Oslo and Silverlight technologies promoted at TechEd.

"Silverlight is really, really slick, especially from a Web app perspective," Warner said. Oslo, he said, was "cool."

"I think Silverlight 1.0 was just a basic Flash implementation," Reiche said. "So it looks like you can do a lot more programming for Silverlight 2, so we'll look into that."