Nice Shirt! (Posted by Avi)

Greetings from TechEd 2005 in Orlando!
Arturo and I are here for the week - I'm here with actual work to do, while Arturo gets to make his own schedule and take advantage of the fantastic presentations that are going on.

First, let me explain the title of the post. For some reason, all Microsoft employees have to wear The Shirt. At face value, no big deal - blue button-down shirt, wrinkle-resistant fabric (thank you, NASA!), all good... But the color... "Blue" is being generous. I think I'm going to submit it to the W3C so that they add it as a named color to the HTML palette. I'll call it "UncoolBlue":

<font color="uncoolblue"> At least us MS employees are easy to find in the crowd! </font>

Okay, perhaps I'm exaggerating a little; it's not that bad :) Today was great - I was staffing the Web Cabana (cabana #7 - drop by if you're here), which basically means I was there waiting for people to come present me with questions and problems that had cropped up in their work.

Overall, I think we had fairly low traffic because people were attending the rest of the show; but things picked up in the late evening, and we're expecting more as the week progresses. We had some interesting discussions with customers, and I gave out my business card for people to ask followup questions. It's really good to see that the problems that people are having "on the outside" are the same problems that we have within MS. App development is app development, I guess.

I managed to catch the tail end of a talk on SQL performance tuning which seemed fantastic; I hope they repeat it so I can see the whole thing. Judging by the descriptions of some of the breakouts, there is a ton of great info to digest; but because I'm booked with work for most of the week I'm going to have to wait for the DVD to come out (that's not a joke; they really do send you a DVD of the classes after the show!).

The other thing of note is the enormous scale of this event. Watching them manage to feed lunch to almost 12,000 people at one time is amazing. I can't imagine what it takes to organize something like this - I'm really impressed.

Looking forward to today!

Avi