Everyone is settling down to the routine here in Orlando. I will probably do some Architecture Cabana duty before Friday, and my next event I must go to is a rehearsal Thursday night then first thing Friday morning I speak. So between now and Friday I have time to get some backlogged work out the way and take in some TechED experience.

This morning I enjoyed going to Paul Flesner's keynote on the new BizTalk, new SQLServer, new Visual Studio Team Systems and some 64 bit server stuff. There were some product announcements, but what I enjoyed a lot was the RFID demo they gave. Basically everyone here at TechED randomly got a small sticker with a huge number on it but inside the sticker is an RFID chip. All around the TechED conference are RFID readers picking up signals and on stage in Flesner's keynote we got to see how easy it is to use the new Visual Studio to build a small RFID app. What was also cool was they ran a small prize give away to people in the audience using the RFID signals from the people actually in the audience :-) Sweet !!!

What I really liked though was I was one of the early people in Redmond working to get RFID onto the development agenda, about 3 years ago. Then, Microsoft wasn't doing anything with RFID and it wasn't clear which product team would be the best RFID owner but thru some pretty long discussions we landed on Paul's area and he stepped up to the plate; so it was good today that he got to show some RFID. I was part of a small group that early on waded thru some of the RFID issues, in my case I was on point for RFID standards, but my next door neighbor in Redmond Javed Sikander really was a big driving force that got Microsoft sold on RFID. Javed is still part of my group and back then he put in major time and lobbied super hard to address RFID, crashed a few doors along the way, and now there's a new RFID dev team working hard to get new product out sometime 'next year' (as Paul mentioned in his keynote today).

On a private note, I think I've got the over flow of food here down and I'm making sure to get some good gym time in now every day. My daughter gradutated from school yesterday, she goes to school in Holland, so right now I'm feeling really good.

Looking forward to more TechED, and catching up on some work in between events.

/Dave