I finally found some time to do my last posting on the SharePoint Advisor conference here in Vegas. I honoustly must say that I did not attend a lot of sessions anymore but based on the feedback I got from the attendees here the level was very good. One of the things I like about this conference is that the number of people is not that high (around 650 for the four conferences) and you get most of the time the same people in your sessions who you start to know better and better. Social contacts are quickly made here and I had a lot of good conversations with people the last couple of days. Regarding my two last sessions, I think I did a pretty good job demonstrating the capabilities of InfoPath in combination with SharePoint and the various coding techniques for creating document library event handlers. So now that it is all over, I have two days to relax a bit, work on my MSDN papers that need to be finished very soon and explore the interesting places before I leave on Saturday to campus in Redmond to work for a couple of days on very exciting new technologies.

Now, there are also a number of exhibitors here in Vegas. You have the traditional ones like AvePoint and CorasWorks but also MondoSoft, Longitude and Ontolica with their search UI extensions. Cool stuff all of them. The newbies in SharePoint country are definitely the WinApp Technology guys with their brand new product called Echo for SharePoint. I will do a posting one of these days about their product but basically it allows for fast replications of changes to Web parts, sites, settings, areas, lists, libraries, ... from one site to another. Ideal tool if you need to go from development server to staging server to production server. Excellent stuff. Visit their web site to learn more: http://www.winapptechnology.com/

Btw, my TechEd session is again switched back to the Site Definitions talk. So no ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts but again real SharePoint stuff. And since my MSDN paper on site definitions is almost done, I probably have some cool things to show as demos. Looking forward to it.