So guess what, still raining in Seattle. Who’d guess.

Anyway, I’ll try to wrap up some of my experiences here.

First’s day’s keynote at TechReady was held by Steve Ballmer the CEO of Microsoft. This was an amazing event to witness. Man, the guy knows how to handle a crowd! Action, energy and a clear message! Mixed up with one or two jokes. I feel privileged to have been there.

He talked about a lot of things such as acknowledging MS Services as a very big sales force and providing valuable feedback to the product groups. He talked about the goals for the coming year where the search war against Google and the browser fight against FireFox kinda topped the list. There were a lot of other things in there but I’m soon getting ready to go to the attendee party so I don’t have that much time to spend on this post.

The rest of the first day was very Microsoft internal with breakouts for the different roles. In the services track there was a lot of focus on internal tools and getting people to use them in order to collect more information in one place and make searchable, indexed and all that.

The second day the real technical stuff started. Keynote in the morning then I hit the IIS 7 developer drill down. I must say I’m impressed of the new IIS. It’s much more componentized and modular. For example the authentications available in IIS asp.net (basic, forms & windows) are all separate modules now. So you don’t even have to install the ones your not interested in using. Much like Apache is today I guess. All configs are now xml (of course), including the metabase. As always when you see unreleased stuff you want it right away. But IIS 7 will ship with Windows Vista Client and further on with Longhorn Server. So we’ll have to wait a while for it.

Gotta go grab a beer in the lobby!

Cheers!