SharePoint Conference Las Vegas Day 1

So day 1 of the SharePoint conference is over, and here are some highlights from the day.

The day started off with some good keynote sessions (2.5 hrs!) with a lot of demos. Included one of Business Connectivity Services where Tom Rizzo in notime created an External Content Type in SharePoint Designer by connecting to a database and a Customer table, stepped through a wizard to create CRUD methods and published it. That allowed for offline caching in Outlook of a list based on the type, acting like a Outlook Contact list with Save funcionallity. Impressive stuff!

I attended the overview sessions for the rest of the day:

• Overview of the SharePoint 2010 Developer platform: lots of demos and a lot of content showing the long awaited VS integration, which looks fantastic by the way.
• ECM for the masses: Good session with a lot of new stuff, document sets, new records center capabilities and more
• Overview of Social Computing in SharePoint 2010: Basically a introductory session on the Social Computing capabilities in SharePoiint 2010, but not so many demoes

In the evening there were a lot of community gatherings around in the hotels, including us from Norway who had a great "Norwegian night" at the Aureole Restaurant hosted by the Micorsoft Norway dudes and dudette.