SharePoint Conference 2008, Day Three

Day three started with the Bob and Joel show on the big stage. Bob didn’t wait long to violate the cursing policy – his first statement of the morning was caught by an open mike when the lights went up. I was batting 100% on my predictions: we got a Bob 1.0 snapshot, a picture of AC, and a snide reference to my hat. Believe it or not, Bob actually did a PowerShell demo with real object model code – I almost choked on my soda when I saw it (he failed to tell us who actually wrote that for him, I noticed). Welcome to dev land, Bob!

I spent the afternoon in a confidential session but Sean took in the AJAX talk. We snuck in on the end of Todd Baginski’s session on Single-Sign On which had some really excellent code samples and guidance on deploying and managing Forms Based Authentication in SharePoint. Afterwards, there was a game night on in the exposition hall, complete with Master Chief walking around and more Xbox’s than you can shake a controller at.

After a couple of drinks and a piece of what I can only describe as a chicken-flavored cardboard substance, we headed over to Kell’s for Bob and AC’s SharePint by Night meet-up. A proper bowl of Irish stew and a few pints of Guinness got me back on track. The place was packed to overflowing with lots of faces that I hadn’t seen in a while. Gayan made it all the way from Australia, I spent some time hanging out with Patrick Tissegham and Ted Pattison, and there were even a few Scots lurking about amongst all the Irishmen (and women) in the crowd. I finally got to meet Daniel McPherson (Mr. Point2Share himself) and it’s good to see him back in the SharePoint world. A special mention goes to April Spence, former MVP lead for SharePoint, who bailed on a concert with friends to come hang out with us (we miss you April!).

I’m not exactly sure how a dozen of us decided it would be a good idea to walk all the way back to the hotel at 2 in the morning from the bar but it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. With poor Polly from the Ted Pattison Group (where is your blog, Polly?) trying to keep some kind of handle on all us drunken lads, we stumbled our way down (well, mostly up, actually) the streets of downtown Seattle until we managed to locate our lodgings. Somewhere during the evening I lost Sean Skinner, who probably gave up in disgust after witnessing the massive volumes of alcohol being consumed by me, Bob, and the UK gang (Nick Swan and Chris O’Brien were drinking for Queen and Country, it seems – well played, mates). He was probably the only smart one in the group.

Tomorrow we’ll hit the morning sessions (Dave Mann is doing a good workflow session that I want to attend) then fly back to Dallas in the afternoon if weather permits – the forecast is for snow (which will be twice in one week – I think that’s some kind of record).