Tech Ed Day 1 - Live Contacts and my summar

What a day!  Tech Ed has started with a roar.  Its been a busy day with lots happening - in fact I was talking to Peter about something that happened yesterday - it feels like a week ago!

So the keynote was pretty good this morning.  George Moore (GM of Live.com) announced the new contacts gadget which allows web sites to utilize contacts information from my messenger/live mail contacts list in any website with a little bit of javascript on the page.  Pretty cool.  Richard McManus blogged it from the keynote room, thus effectively announcing it to the world.  Jithin is the first NZ blogger to talk about it as far as I can tell on Technorati... although JB was also quick off the mark. Scoble picked up on it and contested the definition of a blog...

I shared a session with George Moore on extending your reach with Microsoft Gadgets.  The session seemed to go well.  Then I sat with Chuck at the back of Scott Guthrie's sessions on developing an ASP.Net application end to end.  It was the first time I've heard Scott speak in person, and it was pretty cool.  I can see why people would come out buzzing when he's talking about new stuff. 

I've spoken to lots of people today and they seem to generally be pretty positive about the event.  It certainly seems to be buzzing.  I had a number of people I'd never met before wander over and start chatting during the ask the experts session, which is unusual for NZers...

Got to prepare for my session on file formats for Wednesday (and get some sleep at some stage).  If you want to keep up with whats going on, keep you browser pointed at www.techedlive.co.nz - you can watch the keynote there now if you like.