TechEd 2005: Day 1 morning

In fact, TechEd started yesterday for many of us: I had a full day NDA meeting for RDs where I learnt a few interesting things and then had some fun with other RDs. The public part of the story started for me this morning: a reasonably good keynote by Steve Ballmer with two high points: Outlook programmability with .NET (yes VSTO 2005 will allow to create impressive Outlook plug-ins) and then MOM, what with a MOM server controlling Sun hardware live, then pulling off fans one by one from the box (and SteveB very much enjoying it), and then finally remotely booting a backup Sun server. Impressive, even more so given that, being a developer, IT doesn't easily impress me.

Later I went to an Office applications architecture session, which opened my mind to a couple of things we can do with Office and .NET (I knew about FabriKam, but GeneriCo was an interesting surprise), but it was mostly a Powerpoint (and some demo screens) thing: tomorrow we'll get to see the code which promises to be interesting.