PDC Day 01 (Holy walking Batman!)

Today I capped out at 14,592 steps. That's 11.04 miles according to ped-o-metre. That's a crapload of walking and I spent a lot of time just messing about at the SharePoint lounge. I expect it to be bigger later this week. It was a great day and there's so much to keep on top of here.

First off must be Bill Gates keynote speech. With a hillarious back to school video (Bill G and Napoleon Dynamite star) it was really great to see the progression from the beginning of Microsoft and the shift that seems to be happening every 10 years or so (has it be 30 years already, wow). Check out Barry Gervin's post for an excellent summary and if you can find the webcast online take the time. It's worth it.

Some of the covers on Office 12 got pulled back with some demos at the keynote and there are lots of screenshots popping up all over the place. I have to check with some people to see if I can use Office 12 for posts now that it's been revealed as I would prefer to use that for some SharePoint screenshots so check back later on that. There's a lot of great stuff happening for SharePoint and Office 12 but it's just the surface. Stay tuned in the next day or so as everything comes out of the closet. You'll be in for a wicked ride. Trust me.

I stumbled across Mike Fitzmaurice in the SharePoint lounge so that was good (we SharePoint guys just can't seem to get organized enough for a dinner or drink-fest, hopefully we'll be able to all get together by the end of the week). Fitz has been doing his mole-like behaviors but popped up with some nice stuff about SmartPart and with the release of SmartPart 1.1 and Son of SmartPart, well, just go and start building. Jans and Patrick do such great stuff. Watch for (hopefully) a lot of posts by Fitz as he's got a ton of new stuff to blog about (mostly as a result of the stuff coming via PDC).

Finally, PDC is freakin' huge. I think there's something like 7000 attendees but they have 50+ buses running from 7am to 10pm between 6 different routes. That's just to shuttle people from hotel to convention centre. I'm sure someone will do a detailed blog post about all the resources that went into this PDC, but as Bill Gates said this is the biggest PDC ever and we're still not even halfway there yet.

Tags and Links
PDC05
Flickr
Moblog
Google Maps where I'm staying (Miyako)