TechEd: Day One

Day one was pretty groovy. The best part about a gathering of wired-folk^*  is putting faces to the names and running into old friends and acquaintances. Marcie and I are staying with at Chateau Swienton this week -- Stephen is a co-lead of the Fort Worth .NET Users Group, on the board of the ASPInsiders, and a terrific developer. We've known him on the lists for a couple years but only met during the ASPAces summit just over a year ago in Redmond. It was good to finally meet his family and giant dog.

There were a few other faces from that trip to Microsoft last year, including (in order of appearance) Stacey Giard, Stephen Walther, and Nikhil Kothari. It was great to meet Ruth Walther, both she and Stephen are relieved now that the new version of the Community Starter Kit is complete and unleashed. It contains many improvements over the beta including improvements to the db which should make extension and modification easier, and it is certainly worth the extra step of manually porting your content to upgrade.

Nikhil had a good laugh about the stir his Sneak Peek Web Matrix blogs created. For all those who want the "tease" to end, he promises the wait will be over soon. His Building Advanced Server Controls (Part Two) is Wednesday, should be great.

Later in laptop lane I met MSDN "Content Strategists" and fellow bloggers Duncan MacKenzie and Kent Sharkey. Great guys, they laughed at my jokes, what more can you say. Duncan wants bloggers and .Netters to get together tonight at the Hard Rock Cafe, see his blog for details.

In the Exhibit Hall I finally met Amy Sorokas and Bill Evjen. I'm looking forward to longer chats later in the week with both. In the evening the Exhibit Hall came alive with people, food, and drinks. Much fun. Now to get back and do it again!

^* The correct term for a group of geeks, originally coined by Peter Dowhaniuk and now used by scientists world-wide is a "gaggle of geeks."