Being at TechEd without thousands of things to worry about is somewhat strange. But I could get used to coming and going as I please, not tracking down speakers, ordering whiteboards and the rest of the responsibility that comes with track ownership.

My first session is right after lunch – 1:15 @ Green TLC Theater 4 if you’re on site. Our Technical Learning Center (aka “the cabana”) is fairly sparsely attended, at least for the moment. MSIT has never had this significant a presence at TechEd before, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the attendees aren’t quite sure what to make of it. I went over to the Architecture and SOA & Web Services area and ran into quite a few people I knew. I expect I’ll spend more time down there than in my cabana.

I skipped the keynote this morning, apparently they did a Back to the Future parody. Had I known, I might have gotten up. But my flight got in at midnight last night, I didn’t get to the hotel until 1am and an 8:30 keynote on the east coast feels like a 5:30 keynote to my still jet-lagged system. Since I skipped it, I’m not sure what was announced, but the opening press release salvo mentions the first CTP of SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 (aka the Visual Studio version formally known as “Orcas”) and the Open XML SDK among other things. I’ve been hacking some Open XML lately, so I’ll have to check that last thing out. Apparently, there was some also discussion of the Dynamic Systems Initiative, but in the press release it came across as Infrastructure Optimization. Not sure if those are one in the same or not.

BTW, for those not attending TechEd, you can check out Virtual TechEd and the TechEd Virtual Pressroom. Not the same as being here – no conversations, no swag and no roller coasters. But at least you can keep up on what’s being announced, presented and spoken about.

I’m off to lunch. Missing the keynotes == missing breakfast. My session is in about an hour, so I’ll probably post again afterwards. I’m hoping for more conversation and less presentation, so the only prep I’ve done is to iron my speaker shirt.

• Saw Shrek the Third over the weekend with the kids. It’s gotten mixed reviews, but I liked it even though it wasn’t as good as the first two. Is it just me, or has sequel-itis reached an all time high? This month alone we’ve had Spiderman 3, 28 Weeks Later, Shrek the Third and the new Pirates movie opens this week.
• Hot on the heels of his post on anonymous types, Scott Guthrie starts to explain LINQ to SQL, which is where all these C#3/VB9 features have been headed. Lots of digital ink have been spilled on this topic since we announced LINQ @ PDC 05, so I’ll just point out that I think this is the first OR/M solution that really works well across the board.
• David Ing sucks the fun out of PopFly by suggesting it might be a “nice data aggregation / reformatting service for technically-challenged managers [and] their business data”. Sounds like the next step of enterprise mashups.
• Speaking of PopFly, Larry O’Brein thinks PopFly is helping restore ” the bridge between power users and programmers”. From the PopFly FAQ: “We’re going back to our roots in 1975 when Microsoft originally launched BASIC for the Altair 8080. Tools like BASIC and Visual Basic 1.0 democratized development by enabling users to easily build applications on DOS and Windows. We believe we can make Popfly a great tool for building and sharing applications on the Web.”
• Scott Hanselman wonders if Microsoft is losing the Alpha Geeks. In a related vein, I wonder if MS should be learning more aggressively from the community. MS has been the source of many developer innovations, but certainly not all. For ideas pioneered elsewhere, we tend to eventually get it, but I think we could be better about it.
• Apparently, I’m just a little younger than video games. Pong was born May of 1967, only three years to the month before me. (via Ozymandias)

As promised, I spent about half of yesterday at TechFest. Ran into some folks I knew, met some new folks, the usual social networking stew of these sorts of events. Here’s some of the stuff I saw. Much of the stuff I saw wasn’t public, but everything below has either a public MSR page or a brief description on the TechFest demo page.

• SecPAL – easily the most work-applicable demo I saw. SecPAL stands for “Security Policy Assertion Language”. It’s a language for expressing distributed authorization policies. We’re looking at authorization policies in the next phase of my MSIT project, so this was very timely.
• 3D Video - Take a garden variety video shot with a camcorder and add computer generated 3D objects into the scene automatically. I actually saw this last year, but this year they’ve added automatic occlusion. In other words, it automatically calculates when a real-world object passes in front of the computer generated object and renders accordingly. Check out this video. This would be great for creating synthetic characters Jar-Jar Binks style (though hopefully less annoying)
• Boku: Lightweight Programming for Kids – Sort of like LOGO, except beautifully rendered 3D, running on the Xbox 360 and programmed using an Xbox 360 game controller. Patrick’s not quite ready for this – Riley even less so - but I’ll be keeping an eye on this.
• F# – nothing really new here, but I got to meet Don Syme in person.
• Telescopic Pixel - Sort of like an LED screen but using significantly less energy efficient and faster.
• Podcast Authoring using Speech Recognition – Instead of the standard waveform view of recorded audio, this app feeds the spoken words thru the Microsoft speech recognition engine and allows the user to crop the audio simply by selecting words. Not mind blowing technology like some of the other stuff I saw, but certainly an interesting combination of technologies.
• Smart Workflow Foundation - Adding constraint solving capabilities to WF. Must noodle on this.

• My boss let me borrow a Tecra M4 that he scavenged from his boss. The display is fairly twitchy, I think it’s a motherboard issue. But it’s very intermittent and I’ll get help desk to take a look. In the meantime, it sure is nice to driving a Tablet PC again. And it’s Vista ready to boot.
• Speaking of Vista, Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista. It’s a mouthful but it’s now available. Soma answers questions about the new release on MS PressPass.
• The DSL tools team keeps on rolling with the power toys. First it was the Designer Integration PowerToy, now it’s the DSL Tree Grid Editor PowerToy. Jeff Santos has the details.
• I missed the TechFest keynote yesterday, but it’s available on demand. They also have descriptions and videos of some of the technologies on display. (well, only one video so far, but I assume since the page is labeled “TechFest 2007 Videos” that more are on the way.)
• There’s new support for integrating WCF and WF coming in VS “Orcas”. Moustafa Khalil Ahmed has the details on what’s new for WF & WCF in the latest CTP drop. For me personally, the WCF/WF integration is some of the most important stuff coming in Orcas, second only to LINQ.

I was going to wait until tomorrow’s Morning Coffee to post about TechFest 2007, but I just realized that Rick Rashid’s keynote will be webcast publicly tomorrow at 9:30 am Pacific time. I don’t ever get my Morning Coffee post out that early, so I figured I’d give my readers the heads up now.

From the TechFest website:

Microsoft Research TechFest provides a strategic forum for Microsoft researchers to connect with the broader group of Microsoft employees and product managers. Hundreds of researchers from Microsoft’s worldwide labs in China, England, India and the US gather for the annual event at the company’s corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. They come together to exchange ideas with colleagues, show off their latest innovations, and shine a light into the future of computing. In many cases, the partnerships formed at TechFest between researchers and product teams allow innovations to begin making their way into game-changing products for Microsoft customers.

I’ve been to every TechFest so far, even the first one when I lived in L.A. (got special permission my my manager to come up for it) and the one where I was on paternity leave after Patrick was born (got special permission from my wife to be leave her alone with a three week old). This one is no different. In fact, I think my whole team is going up on Wednesday.

Last week was been slow, but with GDC and TechFest I’m thinking this week will be much more lively.