I'm here!   It's sunny and nice in San Jose, CA -- a welcome change from negative temperatures, windchills, and the white covering over everything back home.   If you're interested in saying "hi" to me, let me know!

I just got out of Bill Gates' keynote speech.   This is the second time I've seen him up-close and personal (first time being PDC 2005).   He's a good speaker.   Very at-ease, in-control, and quite polished.   I'm sure that it helps that he lives and breathes this stuff and makes presentations to people all the time.

So far, no actual sessions, but there looks to be a pretty good range of topics.   I'm very interested in finding ways to visual SPList data, and programmatically working with that data outside of SharePoint.   There's so much possible with the entire Office stack that it's hard to really wrap your head around everything.   Thinking of documents and spreadsheets as presentation technologies is a paradigm shift really.   Start with data then find ways to merge it together and present it in the most logical way.   That's always the goal of good software, but it's rarely realized.   Office certainly doesn't make it happen -- that's still up to you -- but when you start to think about how it can all work together, it opens up new horizons.

Boy does that sound like marketing BS!   Maybe I'm drinking the Kool-aid after writing too many whitepapers and product demos, but I do believe it's true.   It's not a matter of superiority to any other platform, or inherent features not available anywhere else, but it's a pervasive platform (what company doesn't run Office!) and it finally has the programmatic hooks it needs throughout.