Who says “hindsight’s 20/20”? My memory is smooshing the week together quickly.

TESTING

Tuesday morning I wandered down to the Pearson Vue Testing center to find that the tests were still half price (first 500), so I paid for Windows and Web tests and just sat down and took the Windows VB.NET certification test and passed it (narrowly!)

TABLETS

I spent a lot of Tuesday playing with some of the new tablets and wandering around the Microsoft area of the expo (including of course the INETA booth that they gave us).

I also did a Tablet development Hands on Lab. This is a GREAT lab, very clear and even though I have done some tablet programming already with the SDK I learned a ton. I will keep trolling around for an online version of this though I don’t see one right now. Keep an eye on the MSDN Tablet PC Developer center

HERE IS WHERE TO FIND THEM! Thanks to Barry Gervin.

MORE TABLETS – the BOF

I finished up the DevLab in time to run over to the Tablet PC BOF that I was leading. This turned out to be an awesome gathering. I met a bunch of bloggers that I knew online: Steele Price (here’s his blog post on the BOF) and Jay Glynn, for example. Kent Tengels was there, though we had already spent lots of time together since he was at the INETA summit and we bumped into each other throughout the conference (TechEd is funny that way – 11,000 people and you can almost count on seeing people you know over and over..a good thing of course). Also a bunch of folks from the Tablet Team were there including Arin Goldberg, Frank Goczinski and David Hale. The nicest surprise in new faces was Mark Woods, one of the students from Washington Univ. in St. Louis, MO, who had come to compete in the last rounds of the U.S. portion of the Imagine Cup and had come in second place with their very interesting Tablet PC application designed for educational purposes. Also at this session were two people from Univ. of Vermont Business School including one that I knew well by email but had not yet met in person.

I love the BOF’s …they are so free form. It took a while to get everyone to feel comfortable with  that format, so I talked about some of the different things I have been doing with tablet development and started asking questions. Luckily, with familiar people, I knew what some of them were up to so I was able to ask questions that were a bit leading to draw them out….then it really took off. We talked about everything from business apps to educational apps to visual apps to architectural applications. Jane ______ from Microsoft Research was there and has been very involved with what’s going on in the universities with Tablets. We also got a little technical since some people had not realized they could have easy access to the tablet team so they started to ask some deeper questions. I had to pull the direction of the BOF away from that because it was way over most of the rest of our heads.

DINN-DINN with the Tablet Team

After the BOF, Arin, Frank and the rest of the team took the crowd out to dinner so we could just keep the conversation going.

MSDN Parteeeeeee

I had to bow out at about 9 as I had been invited to the MSDN party over at the Bitter End and definitely wanted to go. The MSDN party has been one of the my favorite parties at the past TechEd and PDC events I have attended. Since I was allowed one guest, I brought Stan Schultes, who was at dinner. It was the usual crowd which just gets more and more fun every time – and of course some new [to me] faces as well. I dragged myself out of there so that I could get at least some sleep in before starting the next day.

Still no Kate…but that would be fixed on Wednesday.

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