You can see just a small portion of the vendor area in this shot.
At any rate, today started at 5:45 AM and we got to the convention center shortly after 7:00 for breakfast.
You can see how nice the weather has been and what the Orange Counter Convention Center looks like in this shot.
The keynote address started at 8:30. They had a pretty funny spoof video featuring Doc (Christopher Lloyd) from Back To The Future and Bob Muglia, Senior VP, Server and Tools Business from Microsoft. The gist was that Bob had just finished his presentation (90 minutes in the future) and was booed off stage. Doc explained that the reason was because people are sick of Microsoft's "visions" for the future and just want practical applications that actually work. They went on a humorous adventure in the past featuring people trying to use previously failed software that resulted from Microsoft's grand visions. At one point, they ended up in an alternate future run by giant Bob and Clippy characters (previous, annoying interactive MS icons). Clippy said something like "You look like you're about to scream. Would you like me to help you scream?" with a text bubble just like in Office. It was pretty entertaining. The rest of the presentation was pretty average, but still interesting. If you are interested, the keynote should be available on the Virtual TechEd site soon. If you watch it, you can test Silverlight at the same time! Try it with Safari on a Mac.
You can see the size of the room where the keynote was held. Roughly 14,000 seats (all full shortly after this photo), and 12 25-30 foot diagonal screens.
Doc and Bob came out on stage in the Delorian.
Here, they discuss the goals of the presentation. The red ball you see in Doc's pocket is attached to a horn that he referred to as his MS-BS detector that he threatened to use if Bob started talking about "visions".
After the keynote, I attended several sessions on Visual Studio Tools for Office, Visual Studio extensibility, and IIS 7 for Visual Studio developers. By far, the best session of the day was a trip around Silverlight presented by Scott Guthrie from Microsoft. That product just keeps looking better and better. Man, it would be nice to do browser independent web development without need to write HTML or JavaScript...
Scott in action.
After the sessions ended, Todd and I headed over to Disney's Animal Kingdom to hit the Everest roller coaster since neither of us had been on it. We rode it three times and had a pretty good dinner at The Rainforest Cafe. For the second time this trip, I was surprised by the quality of the food. Having never eaten there before, I assumed it would taste a little more "mass-produced" or something.
Here's a pretty poor shot of the inside of the restaurant.
This is the dessert we really wanted to get but managed to restrain ourselves. Doesn't it look good?! I think the family in the shot was wondering why I was taking a picture of their son blowing out his birthday candle.
I couldn't figure out how to fit these last two photos into the rest of my write-up, so I'm just sticking them here. :)
This is roughly half of the dining area where we get breakfast and lunch. I don't know how many tables there are in all, but it's a lot. The food is actually pretty good, too.
This is the band that provided entertainment over lunch today. They were pretty good.
That's it for today. Goodnight, all.
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