Every year at TechEd it feels like a different experience to me – but always a great one!

In addition to attending some WSE talks today, the highlight of the day was the BOFs at the end of the day. But first was the CodeZone launch party which was fun to attend.

There were 30 BOFs last night! They have 3 time slots with 10 BOFs each. (You can filter on Birds of a Feather on the breakout page to see tonight’s schedule.) I attended Keith Pleas’ BOF to help people with migrating their VB6 apps to .NET (I’m lucky  -I only had to migrate my mind, not any applications), I co-hosted a BOF for women coders (who sometimes don’t generally get a chance to meet other women in their field!). This was great fun as always and Cathi Gero helped me host it. In addition to Cathi, I was happy to have some notable women devs show up including Olga Londer who has authored three books and Ginny Coffey who is speaking at TechEd. It’s nice to be able to have some really visible women to highlight. There were also some guys there including the affable Michael Kaplan (who had somehow temporarily evaded his stalkers).

After this I hung around for Tim Huckaby’s rousing debate on “What the heck is a smart client, anyway”. That one was continued at a hotel bar when the convention center closed down.

TechEd for me is more about catching up with people and meeting new folks. The cabanas this year are expanded but they have a different feel. Since they have a much larger space, the spaces set up for hanging out are segregated from one another, which somehow makes it different. Hard to explain.

Today will be a jam packed busy day. I’ll be working at the MyCodeZone booth for a few hours, then to the Women in I.T. luncheon, hopefully time for some afternoon sessions and then working at the TabletPC booth from 4-5. I even have one of the blue shirts – which I guess I’ll have to wear all day since it is a bit of a haul back to the wonderful hotel that I am staying at. Things are definitely spread out and the hotel for mingling is the Peabody – right by the convention center and it is the speaker hotel. But once I get back here, it’s basically up to the room and done for the night. A little less partying for me this year. I must be getting boring in my “old age”.

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