I think we're getting over the hump here at TechED and people are starting to see the end of the week, tomorrow, but still there's a majority of die hard attendee's showing up before 8:30 in the morning for the first sessions; maybe they were just early for the donouts and expresso coffee's. In general people are settling down, the Speakers Lounge is less frantic, and people are just getting on with business; as compared with Monday when people were showing up, not knowing what they had to do and where they had to go.

Today I managed to get in Ron Jacobs SOA Patterns and Anti-Patterns session, and he seemed to score pretty high marks from the attendees. My main complaint was his sense of fashion.All the MSDN Webcast speakers had to wear a red cape (corney ! like a Superman cape) and the cape looked kinda goofy. Still, anything that seems these days to smell of SOA seems to be able to draw a crowd at least out of curiousity. I know John Evdemon was also supposed to tag team on the SOA Patterns talk but John had to be back in REdmond today for a meeting; so he says - maybe he was just chicken to wear the red cape.

I was going to go to Clemens Vasters session but skipped that one to sit on a repeat session the Office folks were doing on the new Office XML formats they're introducing with the next version of Office; internally code named "Office 12". The concept of saving and fooling around with documents in XML is intuitive, well I think it is, but the Office folks obviously come from a huge background in this space and based on their experience I think they're onto to something that already has a great 'sweet spot'; meaning they've considered a lot of extremely practical uses for the new XML format so anyone can build on Office documents. For more info you probably want to stop by http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview and for a good blog on the new Office XML material check out http://blogs.msdn.com/Brian_Jones

On the lighter side, I had a quick look at the audience evaluation results from all of yesterdays sessions and I liked the fact that a session given on "Internet Safety for Children" scored the highest marks over all the sessions yesterday. There were a lot of great talks, and some really good session marks, but it was just nice to see that topic score.

I also had a nice chat with someone from the Podcast crew - the same guy who crashed Don Boxes session and the scoop on that little stunt was the two guys (Don and the Podcaster) have a running game with each other for a few years; to interup in a friendly way each others talk. It seems, at a last conference, while one speaker was on stage still speaking but running over time - the other speaker just walked on stage and started doing his laptop setup. In return, at the next speaking event, the other speaker did a similar stunt on stage; I'm just not sure who started the 'tradition'.

One thing I also found out from the Podcasters was their Segway's have 3 'electronic keys'; a 3 mph key, a 4 mph key and a 16 mph key. The gripe from the Podcast crew was they were not given the 16 mph key :-)  Wonder why! Seriously I hear there's lots of good traffic to the Postcasts, and I thought they would have close to 100 video's to download by the end of TechED.

Got to clean up my presentation now for tomorrow, and meet the audio crew this evening for a sound check. Max Morris comes in from Seattle later today and plan is for a little dinner after we both get our sound checks done. Max is doing a sister presentation on SOA management (from the Technical view point, while I do a Business view point) right after my SOA Management talk tomorrow.

/Dave