After a week working giving demonstrations at the ANTS Profiler booth I'm feeling pretty tired and my feet and knees certainly were happy to return to sitting behind the desk yesterday. Although, working the booth was hard work it was also extremely enjoyable and the time spent with the rest of the Red Gate team at TechEd was great and gave me an opportunity to see my colleagues in a different light (you know who you are!).

One of the most rewarding aspects of manning the booth was the reaction that ANTS Profiler was getting from developers who appreciated the importance of memory and performance profiling but for various reasons (mainly time and budget) weren't doing it. The demos seemed to be going really well and everyone seemed very impressed with how easy to use the software was and how much time they could save. With some people it was like seeing a switch being turned on and for a couple of people it would have been nice to have had a camera to capture the image of the looks on their faces when I told them the price! Working in technical support I'm not very aware of the competition but to find out that some people had spent thousands of pounds on a competitors product and had to have training even to start using it was quite an eye opener.

The people at TechEd were great and when they realized I worked for Red Gate it was really good to hear the "your software rocks" and "your software is totally awesome man!" reaction from people who were already using our SQL tools. Some people just came across to say they were already using ANTS Profiler and just wanted to say "Hi!".