Day three was quite a long one, filled with some great content.  The day started out with a Keynote by Greg LeMond, the American Cyclist who won the Tour de France 3 times in the late-80's.  He shared the amazing story of who he got to the top, only to fall and struggle back up to the top.  His story is a great one, and shows his determination and character.  A great summery of life he gave is that you never hit the last finish line.  those looking the the finish line as the end, will hit an end.  Those who always look to the next finish line will continue to progress.  He gave some great insights on the current state of the Tour de France as well.

Joel Oleson and Bob Fox (with a guest appearance by Todd Klindt) started off the morning's technical forums with a great presentation on the benefits and features available when using SharePoint 2007 on Windows and SQL 2008.  Joel did most of the talking, including some bad jokes :), while Bob drove.  Joel hinted strongly (with a "wink, wink") that this is the last version of SharePoint that will support 32-bit environments.  He said that the performance gains of the 64-bit environment were so great, that there really was no reason anyone should be staying with 32-bit server environments anymore.  Key Windows 2008 features shown off were the Server Manager, which replaces Computer Management, the Event Viewer, which now has alerting and additional functionality, and the task scheduler.  Another major key feature touted was the performance improvements over previous Windows versions.  Both the SMB core and the TCP stack have been overhauled to give major performance improvements on file transfers.  This is up to 500% in some cases (from what the slides showed anyway)!  IIS7 improvements showed a 10% gain in requests that could be served, which is pretty substantial in and of itself.  Todd Klindt was invited up to show off a couple key benefits in SQL 2008.  Earlier, Tom Rizzo had quickly shown us SQL redundancy, but Todd focused on Admin immediately justifiable gains.  The two he showed off were native encryption, to increase the protection of data physically, and native compression, which will save about 20-35% on disk and time in backups.  Not quite as good as the benefits RedGate will give you, but pretty darn good for Out-of-the-Box.  The demos were interspersed with jokes about Bob 1.0, Eric Shupps' hat, and joking promises that AC would buy the first round at his SharePoint by Day, SharePint by Nite event that evening.

One would think that would fill an entire day... but wait... There's more!  Heather Solomon did a two-part branding show in the main ballroom (Huge! - 4 monster projections screens!).  I missed the first, as I couldn't pass up an opportunity to watch Bob at work, but I stopped in for the second.  Heather's a great resource who really knows her stuff, and she passed out some great hints and tips on getting started in branding SharePoint sites.  Her strongest tips were to either hire someone or learn CSS inside and out.  It is VERY useful in branding SharePoint.  For those learning CSS, she recommended a few of the O'Reilly books and the Zen Garden CSS site.  Other hints she dropped were to make sure you use Contextual Selectors in your CSS and QA, QA, QA... You never know what other bit of SharePoint might share that 1 style (out of over 4000!), so make sure you test fully.

I stopped in on Todd Klidnt's STSADM session to see if I could learn a few new tricks... I'm pretty good with a command line, but I've heard Todd knows his stuff... Although the session started off a bit slow (mostly because of a big lunch that had everyone snoozing), Todd showed off just what you could do with that one command-line utility (with over 180 commands in it!).  Some of the things I gleaned were around Backup and Recovery (I don't use the native backup, I use AvePoint's DocAve product), the DatabaseRepair operation for cleaning up orphaned objects (I'm having this problem right now), and some of the new functionality in the MergeContentDBs operation, which can be used to merge or separate Content Databases.

Last for the day, I parked in Ted Pattison's Solution Deployment session.  I thought my brain was full before!  Ted showed off some great utilities and practices for building solutions, including a great tool he helped design called STSDEV, which has built in templates and MSBuild scripts for creating your .ddf and Manifest.xml, and more importantly, updating them as you work and compile!  I'm downloading a copy for myself as I type this...  He also showed some great examples of how to manually create feature receivers with OnFeatureDeactivated methods to manual undo changes you Feature may have made.  Features do not uninstall the artifacts they install, nor will they overwrite existing files (ie installed, source updated, retracted, then reinstalled).  His demo code is posted here, and shows some great examples.

Turns out that I've been pushing the torn ligaments in my foot a bit much this trip, and I'm having trouble walking, so I'm spending today reviewing my notes, downloading tools, practicing some of the tricks I've gleaned, and catching up on some of my workload!  There looked to be some good presentations today, including a couple on using the new MS Extranet Solution Accelerator and of course Dustin's SPD presentation, which is always good!