At TechEd!

Arrived this morning, looks good. Checked out Don Box's "Don of Web Services" first. Good speaker, good talk. Rather than an educational spout ("here's how you do this"), it seemed a demonstration that things finally work the way they should ("it now does this"). That's a bigger turning point than it looks in print.

Knowing that you can generate downloadable Word docs with plain ol' XML works for me. Infopath is the new WordPad, you won't love it but you'll use it for the quick and the dirty. I'll skip the rest, it was terrific and I'm sure you'll be able to read more elsewhere.

Free swag is good. The backpack is the obvious prize, MS always puts a well-designed piece of "furniture" in the mix and this is it. Inside, aside from the usual stack of brochures (some days you long for ignorable brochure-ware), there's some toy cars and a decent stack of demos: BizTalk Server 2004 Beta, Exchange Server 2003, a pile of good ones I already had including the Patterns and Practises CD and some Visual Studio toys.

Notably absent from the free swag bag: A Yukon Beta. Not only a bummer for me but certainly for Microsoft. There are a load of Yukon seminars this week, I'm sure these DBAs are chomping at the bit, without bits to chomp.

Gotta run, Marcie and Julia are on the way!