So this is going to be a really short entry b/c I’m up late writing this (1:15am) and I wanted to get some stuff down before I forgot.
Tech Ed day 1 was awesome. I didn’t get to go to many of the presentations – I spent a large part of my day talking to people. In the morning I went to a Biztalk presentation that didn’t impress Brendon (but was over my head). After that presentation we wandered around talking to people for a while before meeting Rocky Lhotka and Keenan Newton (both from Magenic) for lunch. I have to mention this not b/c I was sitting at lunch next to Rocky, but because we spent a good deal of time talking about the very same debate about objects and O/R mapping vs database engines that I’ve alluded to a few times on the blog. The conversation was really interesting and I’ll be following up this blog with something dedicated to that conversation.
After lunch Brendon had to go work a booth for a while, so I wandered off to do my own thing for a bit. I was on my way to a When to Use What session about creating connected .Net applications when I ran into a member of UG executive team from the Wisconsin .Net UG – Gerry Heidenreich. Gerry and I stood around talking for about an hour and a half talking about all kinds of things, from UGs and leadership styles to knowledge management systems to German board games and even Lee Greenwood (sings God Bless America). We eventually migrated over to a couch to sit down, where we talked even longer about things like Wikis and interviewing candidates for hire.
I eventually hooked back up with Brendon, Rob, and D’Arcy and we made the obligatory swag run through the vendor booths. I’m coming home with two bags full of stuff to give away at the UG meetings.
After the swag run and grabbing some food for dinner, Brendon and I went to the Visual Studio Tools for Office cabana talk where we looked more in-depth at the impressive demo of .Net Outlook integration we saw at the Steve Ballmer keynote. The talk was really cool b/c we not only got to talk with several of the developers and the project manager – we also got to talk to the developers from the company who worked with Microsoft to create a reference application. They talked to us about how they have been able to make their information workers (in this case, recruiters for an executive placement service) significantly more productive by moving the data from three applications and multiple servers into a single view within Outlook. By integrating the applications into something the IWs had open all day every day and were intimately familiar with, they were able to drastically reduce complexity and help their recruiters to build relationships by giving them all their information in an extension to e-mail.
We finally quit at about 9:30 and headed back to the hotel. Brendon and I wandered around looking for D’Arcy for a while, but we never found him and eventually quit and headed off to our rooms after we got tired of talking to each other.
Great day and I’m looking forward to tomorrow.
— Matt Ranlett
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