I definitely made an “executive” decision that since I was going to get the DVD’s, I would not spend my entire TechEd time in sessions — though there were some speakers I definitely wanted to see doing their thing live while I was there.

I found the hands on labs valuable, being able to take the cert tests (which I have avoided for many many years) and what I call hanging around with my friends — and others refer to as networking — to be things that I could not do from the confines of my home office. I met and talked to a lot of microsoft people that are interesting to me, Kit George, Eric Gunnerson, Dan Fernandez, Jan Gray more more more more and though I didn’t get to check in with Keith Ballinger after his talk (which I definitely went to!)  I did happen to meet and spend some time with Lara Ballinger, who is another softie and just happens to be married to Keith. I completely missed seeing [fellow .NET Rock Star :-))  Paul Vick, which bummed me out. But I did spend a bunch of time with another VB’er Jay Roxe and have him PENNED IN for November at VTdotNet, right Jay???

Fun as always chatting with Korby Parnell who had a lot to gloat about during TechEd – VS2005 Team System is his baby.

I did attend sessions definitely (and I evaled all of them!) and if I had unlimited time I would have attended many many more. But it is just way too fun to get an opportunity to hang out with people you know, people you like and people that you have a lot in common with (even if they are way the heck smarter than you!)

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