Wow… what a great show last week. It was filled with a TON of fun! We started it off with a great SharePoint by Day, SharePint by Night at EyeCandy.
Plenty of folks lit up Twitter & the blogs repeating all the great info that was now available now that the NDAs were lifted. I thought you’d see a flurry of a TON of blog posts on Monday morning at 12p ET when the NDAs were lifted, but only a handful came out. I put up four myself, three on how WCM has changed in SharePoint 2010 (part 1, part 2, part 3) & one on the new service application architecture. Looking forward to the reaction of many folks.
I have to admit that when I saw the band selection (Hewy Lewis & the News) I was pretty disappointed. But they didn’t disappoint! 80’s night on the Mandalay Beach was a ton of fun.
One of the coolest part of any major SharePoint conference is the people you meet. I got to finally put faces and personalities behind the many folks I’ve crossed paths with on Twitter, Facebook and blogs.
I didn’t have any sessions to present until the end of the week… just my luck as I lost my voice on Wednesday morning. But my two sessions on Thursday felt good… the one I did with Chris Johnson from Microsoft (Upgrading a MOSS 2007 WCM site to SharePoint Server 2010 WCM) was a *ton* of fun… CJ and I had a blast! My other session on building custom service applications was also a lot of fun. I just uploaded my custom service application to the Critical Path Training members only section… if you’re interested, go download it there!
On Friday Ted Pattison & I conducted a full-day post conference developer workshop on SharePoint 2010 for 250+ developers. A good time was had by all and we even played a joke on the IT Pro’s doing their workshop next door. When we heard them applaud, we all looked at the wall separating us and boo’d real loud. Was real funny… nothing like keeping the IT Pro vs. Dev battle going!
For most the week stopped there, but for me it kept going. My wife flew out to Vegas on Friday during the post-conference workshop and we stayed the weekend to see U2 in concern (more on that in another blog post).
Oh… it was Vegas after all… there was plenty of gambling involved. I’m a blackjack guy (if you couldn’t guess). I usually like to play single deck because its much easier to have the advantage and play the odds, but I only got to play that one time (and won $500 in a few hours) as a lot of folks were curious how to play and wanted some tips. It’s hard to make that work on a single deck table so I instead played a full shoe. All in all for the week I left Vegas a winner (that makes it the 9th time out of 11 trips) so I can’t complain. I’ll be back in Vegas in two weeks for SharePoint Connections Fall 2009 and plan to hit a lot more single deck to make some real money!