At Tech-Ed 2004
I arrived in San Diego last night for Microsoft's Tech-Ed 2004 Conference. I arrived at the Hyatt down the street from the huge San Diego Conference Center and checked in. I decided ot walk down to the conference center to register for the conference. While walking down the street I ran into Jon Box. We met up later for dinner and and I met several of Jon's fellow Regional Directors.

This morning, I arrived at the center for a great breakfast. One thing is for certain, I will definitely get some exercise this week. The conference center has to be 4 city blocks long, and Microsoft has taken over the entire building. There are over 11,000 attendees at the conference. Microsoft seems to have taken over the entire city of San Diego. There are Microsoft banners all over.

The Opening Keynote was delivered by Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. His address was somewhat interesting. In it, he announced WSE 2.0 and the Office Information Bridge. I will try to post more information about these new technologies as I find it. (WSE 2.0 can be found here.)

I also saw a good presentation by Don Box that discussed the Services Oriented architectures. They discussed the future of COM, COM+, SOAP and other interop technologies. Interesting to hear them say that folks should avoid .NET REMOTING in favor of ASMX. Their point is that although performance isn't as good, the model is better and improvements in ASMX performance are coming.

I am currently hanging out in the Community Lounge, near the Cabana area. I'm looking forward to learning more about the upcoming technologies planned.