Bill Gates was at the Tech Ed in Orlando. I found a spot about 5 rows back so I could actually see him. He looked pretty real. All those rumors about him being projected on the stage with secret holographic technology are untrue. :) He's actually leaving the board of Microsoft (going part time) to work full-time on his Foundation's board.
Overall the whole Tech Ed experience is awesome. 6000 developers (some females too) from all over the world. Ran into a guy from Denmark. He works for a beer company. How cool can that be? SharePoint and beer...
I still can't get my mind wrapped around Silverlight. Though I do belive it has its uses especially for Intranet implementations. But - as someone pointed out - it won't be long before SilverLight is pushed down by a Windows Update to ALL PCs running Windows. So public implementations of Silverlight applications are just a stone throw away.
SWAG is in full swing. Got a bunch of T-shirts and such. Oh, almost forgot,
Andrew Connell signed his new book,
Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007
. As far as I'm concerned, he "wrote the book" on customizing Moss (Heather Solomon is my other hero). It was like seeing a celebrity.
Actual solutions. I'm getting convinced about upgrading to
Visual Studio Team Server. It's possible to track bugs and EVEN maybe not too long from now let my designer have access to the same files the developers are working on USING Expression Web. I'm optimistic Mr. Gates will make it happen.
I'm looking forward to some sessions on SharePoint on Thursday and Friday.
Andrew Connell is presenting on Thursday and
Rob Bogue on Friday.
My wife is flying in to Orlando tomorrow. Can't wait to see her. We're headed off to Daytona for the weekend. In a convertible and all...