TechEd Day 2 - later that day
As the day wears on, and the sun goes down, its time to head down to the Exhibit Hall. The place is heaving. Lots of stands with people demo-ing interesting stuff. The usual tables laden with food (although still no little debbies - Marcie are you listening?). T-shirts, baseball caps, yoyos, trial CDs, beer, wine, geeks, giant beanbags, a shiny blue car on a stand, more geeks, more food. Laughter, wine and song. Well not song, exactly, but poetry for sure.
Speaking of which, I bumped into heaps of people. (Actually, they were all standing independently on their own two feet, and I didn't exactly bump into them.) Anyway, amongst these non-heap people were Joe Andreshak who was talking about Office System earlier today, and (finally getting to my point), I discover that Joe's been given to poetry and song lately, and has even been blogging song. Crikey! I vote we get Joe to stand up and sing in the Cabana this week. Any seconders?
Who else didn't I bump into today? Let's see: Julie Kremer and John Durant - I gatecrashed their conversation and forced them to listen to my theory about body chemistry (or, 'why girls are more difficult than boys'). John will be talking about Fun with Outlook on Thursday 1:30-2:45, Room 3 - I'm looking forward to it.
Randy Byrne also had some very interesting things to say about Outlook. If you get a chance, you should definitely try to not bump into Randy, and tell him what you want for Outlook programmability going forwards.
Oh, and Jan Fransen, another of the OZ gang, who will be teaching InfoPath in the Hands-on Lab sessions. Todd Abel (who has also just started blogging at OZ - hurrah!) and who has been working furiously with Charles Maxson and others to release IBF. (I suppose anyone would be furious, having to work with Charles - you know about Charles and ice cream, right?). Then, there was Kelli Crump, she of dotnetjunkies fame. And, of course, the Indefatigable Kunicki. The IK will be talking about Research Services on Thursday 5:00-6:15, Room 32AB - another of the many, many sessions I'm looking forward to this week.
Well, time to go and write some code now. I'm polishing off a Visual Studio Wizard for generating COM shims for managed extension assemblies - that is, add-ins, SmartTag Recognizers/Actions, RTD components. You point the wizard at the managed assembly you want to shim, and it generates all the shim code for you. Based on Misha Shneerson's excellent work. I'll be writing about this soon. Meanwhile, would anyone find this useful?