Well day two and day three somehow got lost along the way so I've ended up writing this while waiting at Tegel airport for the flight home on day four.
Tuesday
Tuesday ended up being a really early start. On monday night I'd forgotten that I had signed up to be helping at the hands on labs from 8am to 10am. I managed to get there at 8:30 which wasn't too bad :-). All of the lab PCs were working now as well which was good news as from that point onwards the room was pretty full with a queue sometimes forming of people waiting to get on. The labs was a good place to meet up with the other MVPs as there was generally two or three were hanging around.
After my hands on labs duty Michael Greth interviewed me on BDC Meta Man for his SharePointPodCast.de. Thankfully the interview was in English! :-) I'll post a link to it when it's up on his website.
I attended Steve Smiths second session of the conference on Capacity Planning for SharePoint 2007. Really enjoyed this session as Steve gave away lots of real nuggets of things to think about when planning a deployment. The stress testing tool in VS 2005 looked really good as well although it seems a shame it's apparently only in the Software Testers Edition (didn't know that existed, or is it part of Team System?)
I managed to get some flowers ordered for valentines day which kept Sophie happy. I'd asked her to come to Berlin with me as being a teacher she had the week off for half term. She didn't want to though as she thought she'd be stuck at the hotel by herself all day. I only found out on the last day that a few other MVPs and attendees from the UK had bought their wives/girlfriends along. Next time I'll get Sophie to come as well.
The event in the evening for all the delegates was a suprise party so everyone piled into buses and headed off. People from the UK had a seperate area to congregate and drinks were kindly supplied by Artemis Corp. This was also the evening of the MVP dinner which we headed off to a little earlier and planned to join up with everyone else later. The place where we ended up eating though was around an hour away from the party so by midnight we realised it was too late to go across. Steve and I left around midnight as we were both pretty tired, but upon arriving on Wednesday we found out some people had managed to stay up drinking until 7am!
Here's Steve Smith, Stacy Draper, and Spencer Harbour. I'll let you guess which is which! :-)
Wednesday
I think three days is about the right length for a conference. Anything longer and I reckon people get a little fed up with it and start missing entire mornings/afternoons or may be even a day.
I managed to get my five minutes of presentation duties today. Mike Fitzmaurice asked me on Sunday if I'd like to come up and demo BDC Meta Man at the end of his session on Business Data Catalog. Mike was very kind in singing our apps praises before I'd even got up, and it was very nice that it got a round of applause when I showed how much xml was generated in the application definition file after just a few clicks. Afterwards quite a few people wanted to speak to me about the app which was great and I was at the Combined Knowledge stand most of the day so there was a trickle of people who were asking me questions. Here's a pic of me talking with the big video screen behind me
At 2pm it was time for the Combined Knowedge laptop draw! Tons of people turned up. A Sword colleague of mine, Deborah, had entered but actually left Berlin on Tuesday evening. You had to be here to win the laptop so I was going to pretend that it was her card that was pulled out. After the draw we actually realised her card was the next one on top so would her being chosen was very nearly the case.
After the final sessions of the day there was a little packing up to do, and then enjoying a few more beers with people at the hotel bar.
Overall I think the conference was great. The venue was brilliant (and massive), and there were so many staff organising and help the conference run smoothly. Thankfully everyone I met spoke English as well which was a great help. Thanks to everyone who came and said hello. It's nice meeting people who read your blog and encourage you to keep the writing going. Next conference I might be attending...TechEd perhaps in the US?