Apologies for not posting this last night but when I got back to the hotel there was something wrong with the Internet connection to the outside world. I just blamed it on the lightning show going on outside and went to bed.

I enjoyed the first day of TechEd. The keynote was Bill Gates' last one (or so we have been told) and it was a fairly typical keynote. My biggest complaint is that I wish they would stop showing off database refactoring. In the real world when you rename a column in a database and are not using stored procedures as an abstraction layer (as this application was not) then a lot of other applications suddenly break.

I did a little bit of booth duty and then was privileged to have lunch along with 14 others with S. Somasegar and Bill Gates. We had a Q&A session where Bill answered a lot of questions about what he is going to be doing and how he feels that his foundation and technology can help make a difference in the world. It was clear that he had researched the issues and understood where he could make a difference and where corruption or bureaucracy would limit the effectiveness of his work. After the event some of us were talking about how inspiring the talk was.

In the afternoon I gave my talk on what is new in Windows CardSpace in the .NET Framework v3.5. If you missed it the streaming version should be available by tomorrow. I enjoyed the session and especially the questions that came at the end.