Boy, I wish Connections had been setup as good as this one is... From the starting blocks, I have been impressed with how good this conference is setup.  I unfortunately am starting this conference off with a torn ligament, but I'm limping along as best as possible.  I ended up missing the first couple of sessions today, unfortunately, due to both production issues and my foot..

I started the day off by trying out public transportation and taking the bus... It wasn't too bad, except when I went to come home I realized the route getting there was a one-way street, and I didn't know what street the return route was on... I ended up walking all the way back to my hotel, which was about a dozen blocks away...  Could have been better, but I brought it on myself :)

My first impressions:  There are a lot of attendees, and they are scaled up correctly to handle all of us.  There seems to be enough staff around all the time, and enough food.  Rather than barcodes or swipe cards, they are using RFID chips in the card (big-brother is watching!)...  So vendor scanning is pretty simple.  Another thing I really like is that unlike the recent Connections event, the vendor hall was open the entire time.  I started off in the hall, chatting with a few folks while the crowds were small...  I got a chance to talk to Ben Curry at the MindSharp booth... If you haven't seen his blog, check it out... He has some great resources there.  I used his stsadm white-paper, along with a post from Joel Olsen and another from Alpesh Nakars to create a script utility to generate automated install scripts for full farm installations (I'll post on that and see about releasing it on CodePlex when I get the rest of the bug out of it). He's a great guy and a good resource... :)

I also got a chance to drop by the SharePoint Bootcamp booth and visit my friends from SharePoint Experts, Todd Baginski, Dustin Miller, and Heather Solomon.  Todd pointed me at a cool new option from Microsoft called "Shared Source" that allows customers and partners to get access to portions of source-code for Windows and major software, including WSS.  Get more details here.  He also clued me in on the awesome snowfall this year in Colorado (He's a ski-nut, if you didn't know!).

I got a chance to talk to so vendors about some very interesting and promising new products, including the new search suite from BA-Insight and the eSense Visualizer from NSE, but I'll blog about those another time.

I missed some of the beginning of the First Keynote from Bill Gates, but caught the last half of it... I cracked up at one thing he said, and had to write it down... When asked a question from the audience about competition from Google, and their productivity tools, he admitted that they are the industry standard for consumer search (currently, he joked), then said about their productivity/business tools. "The day Google releases a business productivity product is generally its best day... although I might be a bit biased."

The following Keynote by Kurt DelBene was good, but fast-passed... It had to be to get so much information in it.  There were a few new SharePoint sites showcased I hadn't seen before, like Krogers, StarBucks Intranet, and Ford's Internal Marketing site.  Also showcased was General Mills internal Marketing site search, which is a custom made Silverlight solution with rotating carousels and dragable results, result filtering and all sorts of goodness.  A couple other nice resources I saw quick demos of (courtesy of Tom Rizzo) were the Cross Site-Collection SharePoint Configurator and the Extranet Collaboration Toolkit.  Both very awesome toolsets. :)

Tomorrow looks to be loaded with excellent options, like AC's publishing demo, Todd's BDC presentation, not to mention Ben Curry's Automating installs presentation and Todd Bleaker's Workflow in VS presentation...  Like I said, good stuff :)