TechEd 2006 - Day 5 - Take me out to the ballgame

It’s hard. It’s hard to blog the same day that something happens when you’re at TechEd.

Here it’s a flurry of activity, an influx of information, an ongoing flash of gizmos and gadgets. In short, technical sensory overload. Yesterday was one of the bigger days. A double shift in the TLC area and my Birds of a Feather (BOF) session sandwiched in between, with a topping of the all-night party thrown in at the end, mixed in with various newsbits like BillG and Mr. Ozzie. That’s a lot of TechEd. Hence why my Thursday post is being written from the TLC Friday morning. Such is life.

Bill, good luck with all that stuff. You and Melinda do good work. Ray, listen to the soldiers. They know good stuff when they see it and don’t take any guff (even from that Balmer guy). Sorry I missed your keynote but let’s do coffee.

It’s all good, although my BOF was a little disappointing. Here I had a good set of new features for developers to discuss, I thought it would be a lively discussion about all the new event handlers, web part filtering, cross site queries, ASP.NET 2.0, providers, and … oh the list goes on. Instead it was a lively discussion but one that sort of drifted into licensing, deployment, and usability land. Oh well, all in all I think it was fun and I felt people got some good conversation and value out of it (which was the point). Thanks for everyone for coming out!

I did manage to catch Scott Hanselman and Keith Pleas on Enterprise Frameworks. It was a good talk and I really enjoyed the banter real-world Scott and mythical-theory-land Keith did. They played off each other well, with theory slides from Keith all airy-fairy and bright and Scott’s “In Reality” slides ala Lessig style white text on black background. I always enjoyed seeing some of Scott’s development kung-fu (and his kung-fu is good) and how they use a 0.0.0.0 release tag for local dev builds (all done through NAnt). He’s a smart dude and you learn a lot from him. Slick stuff.

As the day wound down, I shuffled off to the hotel to de-geekify for the nights festivities. As usual with MS events of this magnitude, they “rented” Fenway park and opened it up for all the TechEd peeps. Some concession stands were closed (I really would have liked a Philly cheese steak sandwich) but otherwise all the food and beer was free, and there was lots of fun stuff going on.

For those that dig the music, Train performed on stage to few hundred (or at least it seemed that way) and it was all good. Myself and Fitz scattered out of there early (after wolfing down the required hot dogs, hamburgers, pizza, peanuts, and assorted ballpark “food”) on to hook up with some friends, which (of course) ended sometime around 3 or so in the morning. Or dozens of martinis. I can’t remember which.

Yeah, needless to say there’s very little sleep that you get at events like this.