OATSystems has been purchased by Checkpoint Systems.

June 23, 2008—Checkpoint Systems, a manufacturer and marketer of RF- and RFID-based solutions for merchandise identification, tracking and security, announced today that it is purchasing RFID middleware and applications provider OATSystems. According to the company, the acquisition is designed to create a one-stop shop for retailers looking to leverage RFID to better track and manage inventory.

RFID Journal - - RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) Technology News & Features

This week at Tech-ed dev week I had 1 session on BizTalk RFID titled "Microsoft BizTalk RFID in Real World Deployments: Connecting Movements in the Physical World to Enterprise Applications".

We showed how developers could use BizTalk RFID and very easily collect events from RFID devices and integrate those events into backend applications using BizTalk Server. I think session was well received. We had 65+ attendees in the session with overall score of 7.73 which is in top 5 sessions in our track.

Other than this I also recorded a video for my first video podcast. Tech-ed team had done a great job of having production team onsite to record 20 minutes sessions. Title of our session was "Mobile RFID Scenarios". Link for the video will be available in 1 weeks time.

If you are planing to attend Tech-Ed It Pro week check out the RFID sessions and attend our booth to learn more about RFID and also win Zune's everyday. Enjoy

This week was Tech-Ed Developer week. Bill Gates kicked off the event. It was huge event with more than 4000 developers attending. BizTalk RFID was there too. Cathexis one of our core partners showed a complete end to end RFID enabled attendee management for our booth. People could come in and get their batches and register for prices. We gave away 1 Zune everyday and few instant prices. People came again and again to the booth to increase their chances of winning.

Many developers were excited to see how they could build RFID enable applications in .NET without much hassle. Go BizTalk RFID!!! We are now gearing up for Tech-ED IT Pro next week which will have double the attendance.

Few photos from our booth and conference...

Today morning 8:30am Bill Gates kicked off Tech-ED 2008 for Developers. It will be a 4 day event with multiple tracks focused at developers. I arrived in Orlando yesterday evening for the event yesterday evening. I am giving a breakout session at 3:00PM today afternoon. Please stop by if you are attending Tech-ED in room 202C.

Bill's Keynote was great as usual. Brian Harry who ran my previous team(TFS) was on stage showing a demo(VS Architect) along with Soma(WPF - Silverlight & VS), Dave Campbell(SQL 2008) and GM for Robotics.

Some photos from Bill's Keynote.