Last Day at VSLive! San Francisco

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I just finished my last talk of the conference on LINQ to XML and it was lots of fun as always. I've spoken a lot on this topic in the past but talks always come out slightly different. This time it was great, I got through all the demos and showed a good amount of Open XML SDK to manipulate Office 2007 documents. I also showed off the VSTO Power tools a bit for viewing the Open XML packages. Amongst the many demos we went through, we built a letter generator from scratch like I've shown before here. I also walked through selecting data from Custom XML parts like I've shown here. I also did my famous Virtual Earth demo that people always enjoy. A few people came up afterwards and told me they enjoyed the talk so that was good :-). One thing that was interesting this time was that most people in the room had seen XML Literals in Visual Basic so I didn't have as much "shock-and-awe". But that's a good thing -- folks are really digging into this stuff!

Last night I was on a panel with a lot of the other speakers and it was interesting to say the least especially being the only one from Microsoft up there! ;-) We had a lot of lively discussions around Azure and Windows 7 but nobody complained about languages or Visual Studio so that made me happy :-).

Now I'm sitting in a talk by Robert Green on building SharePoint Workflows in Visual Studio 2008 and SharePoint 2007. He's walking though the development of a simple workflow that will kick off when a document is created in a doc library. This is exactly where I'm at in our OBA series so I'll get back that that as soon! It's great to validate what I'm building with what Robert is doing here. Here's a great resource for SharePoint development including these workflows: https://www.microsoft.com/click/SharePointDeveloper/

I'm going to go to dinner with Robert after this and pick his brain on a few things. :-)

I've had a great time here at VSLive! SF this year and can't wait until it comes through the city again. It was fun to take BART into the city this week. Many many thanks to all the organizers.

Next stop, MVP Summit in Redmond!