I just got back home from Tech*Ed. What a trip. It was really good to put some faces with names, and to meet a few other MVPs from some other areas. I spent most of my time hanging out with Len Segal, who was the only other Client MVP at the show (that I know of), and Jeff Pitsch and Bernhard Tritsch, Terminal Server MVPs. Jeff and Bernhard let me be an honorary TS MVP for a day as well, an honor I won’t soon forget! I also finally got to meet Susan Bradley, the SBS Diva
and proprietor of msmvps.com, and Vlad Mazek, who’s running an amazingly interesting software-as-a-service business hosting SBS and Exchange installations. I also got to hang out with Vinny Grillo, Clustering MVP, and got to pick the brain of Scott Golightly, who gave a talk on the 10 worst practices in SQL server development
. All in all it was an amazing group of people.
I also had some really fascinating conversations with some Microsoft folks. I got to sit near the mobile computing crew, who had quite a few people from the product team represented (including Jill, an admin, who was working her first Tech*Ed, just because she wanted to!). I got to have an interesting, in-depth conversation with Tracy about what it’s like to be a PM at Microsoft, and another with Sri about dev and test. Totally worthwhile conversations, and very nice people. Particularly interesting was getting their feedback on what it’s like being a part of the agony and the ecstasy that is the Vista train. 
From a technical content perspective, the upside was that Michael Howard and Mark Russinovich were there doing their respective things. There was apparently a chalk talk on fuzz testing, which I had to miss but would have loved to see. The downside was that basically everyone else was a couple of layers too high up the stack for my taste (or expertise!). I just don’t get turned on by Active Directory, and I not a big fan of .Net development, both of which put me in a distinct minority. But it was fun getting to interact with customers and swap stories about remote access solutions.
My next Microsoft-related conference will probably be Driver DevCon, if they ever schedule it again, or maybe the 2007 MVP summit, if Microsoft is kind enough to give me an MVP award again. Failing those two, I’ll see ya at WinHec ‘07.
OK, back to real work. Nothing puts me in a blogging mood like having a feature freeze deadline in a few days, but alas, I gotta pay the bills eventually.