Wow the last few days has been my longest break from blogging in a while. I flew to Boston on Saturday for the WorldWide Partner Conference and spent some time acclimatising. Nice city, good climate and full of Microsoft Partners – 7000 or so in total. It’s always interesting when we have a conference like this as time becomes warped and everywhere you go there are Microsoft people, partners, buses with logos on, drinks and dinner receptions and a general buzz. It’s not every day you see a huge bus go by with SQL Server down the side and barely bat an eyelid. Two weeks time and we do it all again in Orlando at the Microsoft Global Exchange.

With a few days in I’ve not managed to get any PTS-TV footage but met a lot of people at Microsoft UK welcome reception last night that I plan to get on camera -that means you Susanne!. With just over 24 hours til my session on Selling the Stack I’m off to do a quick rehearsal and tech check for that.

Parting thought: nice to see Mr Ballmer on stage today with the same phone as me - the QTEK 8500. Cool other stuff we saw today though – a demo of the forthcoming search capability on Vista, Office Sharepoint and a standalone search client that was very cool. I also saw an amazing CRM Live demo and execs bashing out the words “mashup” with increasing frequency. My guess though is that over 70% of the audience doesn’t know what mashup is so I’ll be back soon to explain more.

[update] – Charlie gives a great rundown on Day 1 keynotes