TechEd Day 1
| CommentsDAMN! Despite all pre-conference materials and inside info, Steve Ballmer *was* the opening keynote (he was originally going to be the keynote for Tuesday). And because of the late night previously…I chose to sleep in a bit and missed it completely! ARGH! I was hoping for a bit of enthusiasm in the morning and possibly another “Developers! Developers! Developers!” rant from SteveB. Oh well, guess I’ll watch the webcast.
I registered (now carrying around two bags – including the one they give you), which is pretty nice. We also got the convention shirt in advance (smart move) as well as a bag of DVDs, magazines, marketing material, etc.
On to the complaints. Wireless lounge: sucked…never got access – got connected, but at < 1MB speeds and couldn’t do anything. I was using my Verizon aircard all day instead of the commnet stuff! I couldn’t believe it – they hopefully will have it worked out by tomorrow. Food: so far it sucks…but this isn’t anything new – you try picking out food for 12,000 people. I’m gratefully they are providing it and the snacks throughout the day.
Good stuff: facility is HUGE. Expo is great and big. Lots of people to see. I met with a lot of RDs and MVPs throughout the day.
Sessions: I went to two sessions today. First was ASP.NET Membership and Profiles. If you haven’t seen that stuff yet, it is really cool. I always learn something new every time even though I had seen that information many times before. The second session was a view of http://www1.msteched.com/content/sessionview.aspx?TopicID=f9102059-5485-40b4-8ba8-7958586651f2 (picture: here). This was great. There was a ton more about Generics than I knew about before. Static classes, generics in method calls, all good stuff. Anders did a great job about talking about what’s new. I got a call throughout the presentation and had to step out for the remainder.
Tonight we had a Nerd Dinner for the west region and invited about 30 attendees to join us at the PacMan Café in Orlando…yes, a true nerd dinner. Nothing says nerd more than pacman, galaga, and pizza :-D. It was fun to talk with all the guys. Richard Hundhausen brought his new book on Visual Studio Team System for us to look at – he and other authors did a great job and putting together the material. I can honestly say it was the first book I’d ever seen that had it’s own “beta” notation! Pictures: Wonder Works (some building upside down), Michael Palermo-Pacman, Pete Miller (well at least his back).
Tomorrow I’m hoping to tackle MikeFitz to talk about sharepoint v-next and show him some cool stuff that customers are working on to see if they are going in the right direction. I’ll recap sessions in more detail tomorrow!
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