Keynote: Office 12: Steven Sinofsky demoed some very cool features in Share Point aspects of Office 12. InfoPath especially has some great updates. It will be interesting to see the developer response; there has been very little code in these demos but there really is a look of important advances for business automation scenarios; I do know that the new Office Tools book from Addison-Wesley has been flying out of the on-site bookstore so I believe there is definitely an interest in these possibilities among the Microsoft developer community.

Started the night with dinner: David Chappell, independent analyst and speaker par excellence, Ted Pattison, Joe Hummel, formerly with Developmentor and currently both working hard in the training space, Ted as a star training instructor with a focus on SharePoint; Joe as a college professor; also, Carl Franklin, Richard Campbell from .NET Rocks. In fact after everybody finished eating we recorded an on-site segment for .NET Rocks. Less than reverent, a lot of fun, and hopefully to soon be available on .NET Rocks.

Attended two parties last night:

Press Party at Figueroa Hotel; fire dancers, floating torch pans in the swimming pool, and the secret .NET Punch, very exotic. Saw Jeff Sandquist, one of the founders of Channel 9; Jeff was one of the first PMs I worked with at Microsoft. I still use many of the email tips, tricks, and protocols that Jeff taught me and still silently curse those who don't do things like: only put people on the to: if they have actions or are being directly asked a question in the mail (unless it's a general message you want everybody to read), keep things short (well, I don't always do that one well), etc. Jeff continues to play a leadership role in Channel 9 as well as overseeing evangelists and other aspects of Microsoft Platform Strategy. I also ran into Keith Pleas and Rockford Lhotka. Both of these guys helped me greatly in my development career (pre-Microsoft) through their books and articles; it's been fun getting to know them since I joined Microsoft and started attending Tech-Ed and PDC regularly. Rockie's Business Object book gave me a lot of great info and paradigms as I built business systems.

Then on to MSDN Magazine party; thanks to Josh Truppin for the invitations. There I ran into a bunch of people I've known over the years at Microsoft; Erica Wiechers, a great friend; she has been the anchor person for the .NET Show since its inception; I was lucky enough to be the MC for the 50th episode special. Erica did a great interview with Bill Gates for that show. Erica is here doing the PDC daily news as well as on-site reporting.

Jana Carter, Jeff Willis, Pete Coupland, and Tarlochan Cheema, all from the Microsoft.com Community Team all attended the party; it's been great hanging out with them and getting to them better here at the show.

We got home in plenty of time to get a good night's sleep so we're ready for another day of engaging with customers.

See you at Booth #36 at the Microsoft Pavilion.

George