Tech.Ed US Day 0 - The Journey Begins

After 28-odd hours (and some of them were very odd) of travel, I arrived in Orlando ready to start the TechEd experience. After a brief sleep, I declined the complimentary buffet breakfast (served on the very best Styrofoam) at the hotel and jumped on one of the shuttle busses to the convention centre.

Shuttle bus and convention centre

Making my way up the stairs I was confronted with the TechEd Credo:

Learn, Connect, Explore - Be part of the experience.

Learn, Connect, Explore - Be a part of the experience. This banner is about 6mx6m.

Next, to registration. I was there at a special pre-conference session attendee time, so the registration area was not very crowded, but there was significant latent capacity.

Registration area not in full swing.

Of course, the big question was - what's the bag like?

TechEd Bag from Orlando

Not bad - certainly better than last year's in terms of usability post-event. Interestingly, this year they've also included a reusable water bottle which will, apparently, do away with about 120,000 disposable water bottles that would otherwise have been used.

Reusable water bottle for TechEd

There's also a bunch of bits and pieces from sponsors, both internal and external, as well as the usual pad and pen etc.

I spent most of the day in Ted Pattison's pre-conference session, "Developing Office Business Applications" in which he did a good job of talking about Office development on both the client and the server.

The last part of the day I spent going to a great session by Corey Hynes called TechEd 101. This was chock full of tips for getting the most out of TechEd and was very well received. I'm hoping to convince Corey to deliver something similar for us when he comes down for TechEd Australia

Finally, I caught up with Dr Neil and went to buy some small electronics bits'n'bobs at the local mall.

Tomorrow promises much, with the Keynote, some cool sessions and the Partner Expo Reception.