Woo Hoo, I got a bag when I registered! Lately, I haven’t been getting them, something about the “staff” on my registration at all of these things… so my laptop bag closet was getting a little empty. I give these great bags away to my friends and family, there are just too many for one person, which is why you might see my mother roaming around with a TechEd bag, or see my wife at the park with my son and a nice VSLive “tote”!

Lots of stuff in the bag, I didn’t even notice a front pocket full of CDs until later, and I think there are even a few betas and eval copies of software in there. Lots of people at the convention center already, mostly for registration and some pre-conference sessions I suppose… the main sessions don’t start until tomorrow.

I was there today because I had to go check out the VS.NET booth, make sure it was ready to go… it wasn’t. The big demo we were told to set up required many things we didn’t have, but we decided that once a customer walks up we won’t want to run through a 30 minute canned demo anyway. We are going to leave the machine with just IIS, SQL and VS.NET 2002/2003 … we’ll code anything the customer wants to see demo’d as fast as we can!

I was a little worried about my caffeine levels dropping during the week, but it turns out that I’ll be fine. I asked a few people where the closest Starbucks was and received this response: “Good luck. Dallas isn’t exactly known for its lattes” … turns out there is one at the Magnolia hotel. That is one of the TechEd hotels, although sadly not mine, which means it is a quick bus/shuttle from the convention center. I think I can shuttle to the Starbucks, buy a beverage and grab the bus on the return trip…. yep; I’ll be fine this week.