Well, here I am in Las Vegas for the very cool MIX06 conference. The Bill Gates keynote this morning was quite good -- giving a solid overview of all the technologies being covered this week: things like Atlas (ASP.NET AJAX framework), WPF, IE7, IIS7, InfoCard, etc. There was also a debate between BillG and Tim O'Reilly about Web 2.0 and the future of the web in general -- quite entertaining.
They also had a guy from MySpace talk about the successes they've had with ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005. They have like 95 million registered users now, and an obscene number of page views. Apparently with going to 2005, they were able to reduce their web server farm from 243 to just 150 servers. Very cool.
I've had problems with the WiFi here, so I'm having to write this from the "Internet Alley", hopefully I can get that sorted out after lunch. I'm still trying to adjust to the meal times here in the Pacific zone, by my watch we should have eaten about 3 hours ago. I sat with some nice folks from Nestle in the keynote, and they gave me some candy, so I like them a lot. I also met the guys who do Squeet, an RSS-->Email thingy, Hamid Shojaee and Jonas Bush, who were sitting with my old pal Scott Cate. They didn't give me any candy though, but other than that they were alright.
To me, the coolest stuff here is Atlas, which Scott Guthrie showed in the second part of the morning session. He had a nice demo with a GridView control (yay!) and everything working AJAX-style with Atlas. I can't wait to see the more detailed talks on that later.
Off to lunch now...
GridViewGirl