My session yesterday went very well, especially considering I did no prep whatsoever. Drew a fairly good sized audience - people were sitting on the floor and standing in the back, though honestly the TLC "theaters" only hold about 50 chairs. Most of them stayed the for whole session - at least until I started to run over (only 15 minutes, not too bad).
After my session, I ended up talking to a customer from a large home loan firm for about two hours. Turns out we had a friend in common, a guy I used to work with a long time ago @ ModaCad named Brian. This is actually the second time I've run into someone at a major Microsoft conference who has a single degree of Brian, which is a little freaky.
For dinner, I went out with some MS field architects and some customers. We ended up having such a big group, we split up into two tables and somehow my table had four MS employees and only one customer. But that customer was from a very large retail firm and we had lots to talk about. Ate way too much, though I didn't combine that with drinking too much. And, as a bonus, I didn't tell the customer than any of their ideas were "stupid", as my friend Christoph pointed out I had done the last time I was out to dinner with one of his customers. (That customer wanted to run Java on their mainframe. I stand by my assessment.)
I was planning to head up to my room, but ran into Jon Flanders in the lobby. Hadn't seen Jon since the class I took with him last fall, so I ended up hanging out with him for several hours, chatting up the folks we knew who walked by, including Rocky, Bob and Brian. I realized I've been heads down with no speaking or travel for about a year, so it's been a while since I had seen many of these folks. For example, I hadn't seen Brian in about three years when we were both presenting at TechEd New Zealand. The downside of hanging out in the lobby is that I didn't get any code written last night, which I was sort of planning to do when I headed back to the hotel. But chatting with these folks - esp. Jon this time - helps be figure out what I want to write anyway, so I guess it's worth it! :)
I ended up sleeping in this morning (still jet lagged) and skipping the morning session. No second keynote this year, which I didn't realize until I looked at the conf guide this morning. Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
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