I'm back from TechEd 2006. I got home last night at 12:30am and went directly to sleep after I showed Kim the tiny amount of swag I got.
TechEd was great - I saw loads of great sessions that have me really excited about some of the things to come - notably SharePoint 2007, Groove, WPF, and the new BI stack Microsoft is building. I'm not going to go into any detail on what I saw here on the blog - I'd rather turn these into user group presentations that I can deliver in my favorite offline fashion. I will tell you this - SharePoint 2007 is the typical version 3 product from Microsoft - it's finally here as a product people will want to use. It's a fantastic story for users, admins, and developers. Much improved. Groove has me so excited that I'm going to start using it on Monday with Brendon, Keith, and Dan to build the upcoming Free Training 123 series.
I only went to two evening events this year - the Microsoft Influencers party at Ned Devine's (free booze, finger foods, and tons of heavy hitters all around) and the TechEd attendee appreciation party at Fenway Park. I walked around the field on the warmup track and touched the Green Monster! To feed us they had all the pizza and hotdog vendors out working. To entertain us they brought Train in to play a private concert. They really put on a great show and that guy Curtis can really sing.
News announced this week: WinFX is now called .NET 3.0 and Bill Gates will be leaving Microsoft in 2008. Buy Microsoft stock after it takes the inevitable hit - it will climb back up, have no fear.
I didn't get much in the way of swag this year, so there won't be a lot of trinkets handed out at local UG meetings like there was after TechEd 2005. This is partly because I just lacked the will to carry a lot of stuff back home on the plane and partly because every vendor there skimped on swag in order to offer a chance to win an Xbox 360. There must have been 100 Xboxes up for grabs there. I bet the odds of winning were something like 1 in 1,000. Way better odds than the lottery, but then I don't win that either. Oh well. I'll just have to console myself with the one I already own. Which is what I'm off to go do for a bit right now. I've just suffered a week without!