TechEd Pre-Conf

After a good night sleep I look back very satisfied on the pre-conference sessions Ted and I delivered yesterday here at TechEd Orlando for a crowd of about 130 people. I think we had a good mix of humor, dead-serious coding, lots of tips and tricks for the attendees and plenty of stuff to take away for further exploration. All of the demos and slides (more than 17 MB) are available for download from Ted's site as well as here from the blog. I started with an hour of demos on what you can do as a .NET developer extending the Office 2007 clients pretty much doing everything with Visual Studio .NET 'ORCAS'. Ted took over with two sessions demonstrating how to develop and package SharePoint solutions. To conclude the day (of course not able to get all of the stuff done that we planned to do), I covered content management and some of the branding options when working with MOSS 2007 portals. My next mission is on Thursday delivering a session covering the object model of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. More coding J .. more fun!

Today's Ted birthday and we celebrated it yesterday already quite a bit. Margerita's and Tequila shots made everybody very chatty J. I tried to stay sober and managed very well (others did not and probably will need plenty of Starbucks coffees today). Planning for today is to follow sessions. I'll start with attending Steve Fox's session on OBA and then take a couple of sessions that cover the options you have to extend Visual Studio. At the end of the day there is a session delivered by Alex Malek on the VS Extensions for WSS. What happens next is unclear. I'll just go by my motto of life ( 'Let it flow' ) and see what happens. Oh yes, I'll be camping quite a lot at Ted's boot. So, if you are in for a chat, drop by!