TechEd Day 1

DAMN!  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).