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Dev Connections Las Vegas 2006, Day 0 - The Keynote. RTM!

Updated: at 06:34 PM

So far, I'm having a great time. Arrived around noon today (Monday) and had an event free ride from San Jose to Las Vegas, then to Mandalay Bay, the conference hotel and my digs for the next three nights. The highlight was almost getting on the wrong bus, and almost leaving my overnight bag on that wrong bus. The nice bus driver actually walked across the street to give it back to me. Las Vegas really has become a friendly place.

A main reason I come to these meetings is to meet interest people (and of course learn new technologies). Standing in line at Starbucks, I noticed a speaker from Microsoft with badge saying ASP.NET. I immediately recognized my opportunity to get answers to all my troubling questions (about ASP.NET that is). Little did he know (that is Richard Turner who is Program Manager of Web Services Strategy from Redmond) that I had so many issues. I asked my first question about the Cache Block in the Enterprise Library while we were standing in line. Richard said "Do you have 5 minutes?". An hour later we left for the keynote. Richard was a wealth of information and most certainly will be receiving an invitation to next years Silicon Valley Code Camp II.

On to the keynote. Lots of speakers to listen to. Mark Markezich, CIO and VP of managed solutions gave the introductions. Lots of new things and cool demos (most of which most of us have seen before). The only demo I hadn't seen that was very cool was one showing the integration of Share Point, Office 2007 and the upcoming Sql Server SP2. The integration with business intelligence was awesome. A little overwhelming maybe for an end user but it has a lot of potential. I've got a project I could use it in right now so I leaned over and asked Richard if everything showing was shipping. He said not Share Point. Drat.

Scott Guthrie rounded out the keynote with a go around of many of the developer offerings coming up in the Vista Release and .Net 3.0. It was hard to watch at one point as Scott's Microphone and PC speakers failed during the demo (poor guy). Considering there were 4500 people yelling at him to press the volume on his keyboard, he did an admirable job of not just yelling at everyone to be quiet so he could figure it out. I have to admit I've been up on stage when that kind of thing has happened, but just not with 4500 people watching.

Announcements

So, the big announcements I remember.

That's about it from me. I'm uploading this with my new t-mobile DASH phone using the Edge network (phone acting as modem to the internet). I have 25 more days to decide if I like it. It's looking good.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow's keynote with Scott Guthrie and Brian Goldfarb. I bet Scott does not have any issues with his computer or microphone tomorrow.