So I had the great honour of representing the Windows Mobile Shell team at MEDC 2006 last week. The conference took place at the gorgeous Venetian hotel in Las Vegas. I'll write a bit here about some of the highlights of the show for me.

A few of us arrived on the same flight from Seattle and shared a cab over to the hotel. Jay and Jason were gracious to let us jump ahead to join them in the colossal queue for taxis. Paul hadn't been to Vegas before, but from the cab he recognized some of the off-strip scenery from PGR3.

Jason and I made it in time to catch the last half of our proctor training session for the hands-on labs. The HOL is where I'd be spending a lot of time over the next few days so it was good to get the low-down on the lab setup. Lots of questions remained though, and we quickly discovered that the information flow seemed to be based on polling rather than push. Kind of like the Today screen design (more on that later).

Well, luckily we have some good connections - like Juggs, who told us about the MVP dinner at AquaKnox. On my way over there I ran into DebugJames who was 'crashing' the dinner too. He's one of the people I've known the longest at Microsoft, as he was a contractor in the cross-platform compiler group where I had my first internship way back in the fall of '93. As we weaved back to the private room I met Simon from the UK technical sales office. He told me all about life in the field and what it was like to be a technical evangelist for large customers. Sounds like fun, but also pretty stressful! He has customers deploying thousands of devices. We grabbed some food and drinks and I sat down with some .NET Compact Framework heavy hitters - Alex Feinman, Alex Yakhnin and Scott Holden (Scott and I go way back - we went to school together). Alex F got tired of waiting for the .NET CF team to write a COM interop layer so he wrote his own. That's some good MVP action! Both Alexes had some good advice on raising children as well, including a pretty hilarious wedding night story!

After the dinner a couple of people were heading over to Treasure Island for another MVP event. I went back to the room (a fair hike since I was in the Venezia tower) to see if Randy had arrived. I also visited a geocache down the street on my way over there, so by the time I got there everything was winding down. I did manage to score a Windows Mobile beach towel though! In the foyer outside the awful Kahunaville bar, I met Guhan, one of the engineers from Palm. There was a crew of nearly 40 people up from Palm, which was awesome to see. There is so much buzz around the Treo 700w (and also on the Motorola Q - more on that later).

Posted by James