This week has been a whirlwind of activity getting everything out of the way workwise to clear the way for my trip to TechEd tomorrow. I can't wait. I've been to quite a few of these now, and every year they just seem to get better and better. Microsoft do a great job of really listening to what delegates at the event say and feeding that back into future events. This year for example saw the introduction in San Diego of "Cabanas", areas of the show floor to relax, and shoot the breeze with speakers and some of the Redmond Dev Teams. I've got a lot of questions to ask about Biztalk and Sharepoint and I'm really looking forward to boring the ears of the Sharepoint and Biztalk teams with my otherwise quite mundane enquiries.
They've also introduced Voice Over IP this year which I think is a fantastic idea, and should make a great story for Andrew Cheeseman's talk on the Tech Ed infrastructure. There are going to be 100 computers available for people to make free phone calls anywhere in the world using the Voice over IP technology, and that's going to save a lot of people an awful lot of time and money in cell phone charges. The calls are limited to 5 minutes each, but even so - way to go Microsoft.
I'm also looking forward to seeing a lot of old friends. I was listening to the DotNetRocks show recorded at San Diego's Tech Ed and a couple of people there pointed out that one really cool part of going to these shows (apart from the huge amount of technical content, free food, free soda etc etc) is hooking up with old friends. Apress are going to be there so I'll no doubt be dropping by the stand every day to say hi to Gary and the team, and I'm really looking forward to hooking up with some of the other ex-Wrox authors.
For now though, I'd better get on with the packing. I intend to take a bunch of pictures and get them blogged too so I really should do something about picking which camera to take and getting the software installed on my Acer Tablet.
1:35:47 PM 
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