Skipped the Archtecture Strategy party last night, plus the Regional Directors 2 parties, and probably a few more parties but made it to the manditory Microsoft pre conference briefing last night; which is my excuse for not going to any of the many parties. Got to pace myself, as there's more parties than you could go to.

Ran into Simon Guest and John Evdemon this morning in the hotel. Both were here all wekend speaking at the TechED Academic conference at one of the local Universities, something that happens before TechED - and it turned out they also didn't show to the Architecture party so I feel like I'm in good company.

At last nights pre conference briefing besides even more food (from all the essential food groups - pizza, beer and twinkies) there was some interesting facts given out like today there's 30+ new Microsoft and Partner press announcements, and Tuesday 30+ more announcements. I didn't know that about 20% of the attendees called themselves 'architects', more than I think most people used to developers and IT managers audiences had realized.

Caught Steve Balmer's opening Keynote this morning and it was Steve's classic high energy delivery of where we're going with our new products, across the board. He really made a lot of announcements, too many to list , so if you get a chance to see a recorded repeat of it I think you'll get a pretty good total view of all the new products up for delivery in the next year to 18 months. Well worth the hour or so to sit through.

I saw a couple of the Podcast people here this morning, running around on their Segways, but I have yet to enter the main halls with the Cabana's for people to get 1 on 1 with the Microsoft staff, and the Partner exhibition area; oh yes and the games area. I wonder if they've got a new Xbox 360 around :-)

Gotta run, put in an appearance at the Architecture Cabana.

/Dave