Despite missing 2 flights yesterday (one – snow in my driveway, and one - United Airlines "issue"), I arrived here bright and early at 7:00 am this morning (14 hours later than planned) on 4 hours of sleep (5 hours less than planned).

The joint Microsoft / Interop Vendor Alliance booth is up and running and already had a handful of great conversations with folks during lunch & happy hour this evening. I even had the fortune of running into and chatting for a bit with Sam Hiser and John Gøtze. I hope to run into them again during our roundtable discussions tomorrow.

I heard rave reviews of the Mark Logic session delivered this afternoon by Matthew Turner on Open XML interoperability with the Mark Logic product. I was unable to attend the session but I stopped by their booth to get caught up. Matt and John Kreisa kindly talked me through it again and I must say that this is one of the most compelling demos that I have seen as of late that really takes advantage of the Open XML format including deep custom schema integration. I hope to be able to work with Matt & John make this demo more widely visible as it a great showcase for the power of Open XML as well as great product interop.