2 Keynotes this morning.  The first one went long but essentially highlighted Windows7, Live Services (including Live Mesh), Scott Guthrie's tour of new tech (including WPF futures, .Net 4.0 , SilverLight 2, and VS2010), and then a sneak peak at Office 14.

 

Windows 7 looks pretty much just like Vista with a few new UI tweaks and much in the way performance improvement.  Two super cool new features though are: multiple-monitor support on RDP connections, and native mounting of VHD's as drives INCLUDING THE ABILITY TO BOOT FROM THEM!  The major thing demo'ed from Office 14 was "Office Web Applications" which is essentially web versions of OneNote, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, that render pretty true to the desktop apps (both in interface as well as document formatting), and support multi-user collaboration.

 

The second keynote was Don Box and Chris Anderson doing their typical All-Code demo where they built a cloud app from scratch.  It was highly interesting and entertaining, but as expected very fast and mind-crunching.

 

After lunch I caught the tail end of the Coding4Fun lunch session... I had hoped to see more of it, but with the keynotes running about 30 minutes late, there wasn't much time.

 

Next I went to Ori Amiga's Live Services: A Lap around the Live Framework and Mesh Services.  Ori is a great presenter and with the LF and MS I can actually now see how Azure can be leveraged in real applications.  They've really done a good job at abstracting away some complexities and providing some base services that can be used right away.

 

Then I went to the "Making Apps More Social" session.  I think this session had a ton of potential and the presenter had some good ideas and a lot of passion.  Unfortunately I think the presentation itself wasn't prepared that well and it was a bit of a disappointment.

 

Rather than going to the last session of the day, I completed my Surface scavenger hunt, which got me a ticket to their hands on lab and SDK invite.  The lab was pretty cool, both using the Surface Simulator app (it uses 2 mice) and a Surface unit itself.  I'm definately going to have to brush up on my WPF skills.

 

Tonight was the Attendee Party at Universal Studios, which was only a short walk from my hotel.  They had a Halloween theme going on, including fog covered walkways and zombies/ghouls and stuff jumping out at you with running chainsaws and stuff.  The rides were so-so, but one great show was the Bill and Ted meet HellBoy show which was hillarious and had great dancing.  Of course all the food and beverages (beer) were free.  Right towards the end I got trapped on the Simpson's ride with a bunch of the codeplex team, but luckily they got it running again after about 10 minutes of waiting in the dark.