Tomorrow, Tech Ed officially begins with day 0.  Today is the day before as well as the pre-conference sessions.  This morning I slept a little later than I should have, but I didn’t go to sleep until 4AM anyway.  Scott Bellware and I went straight to the JW Marriott for the INETA summit.  I met Julia Lerman and Chris Wallace in person and saw some familiar faces from Party with Palermo the night before. 

Now I’m at Jeff Prosise’s pre-con session: The Zen of ASP.NET 2.0.  He’s doing a great job of going over all the new features in 2.0 for ASP.  When doing demos of feature-sets, it’s quite difficult because you want to set a good example, but how do you demo the SqlDataSource control without calling data out of your UI layer?  You can’t, but afterwards he made sure to mention the drawbacks of the absense of a dedicated data layer.  We all know a lot of RAD programmers write all code in Page_Load, and their applications are very hard to change after version 1, so I recognize the difficulty in demoing the cool new features without encouraging bad design.

Later tonight I’ll be attending the INETA party, and I can’t stay too later because I really need some sleep.

The Party with Palermo was a great success.  There were 29 people who made it for the geek dinner portion, and we had _tons_ of people show up at the bar and stay until past midnight.  Here are some of the people who made it (and wrote legibly on my notepad):

• Scott Bellware
  
• Rob Zelt
  
• John Lowthers
  
• Jeff Schoolcraft
  
• Mickey Gousset
  
• Laura E. Hunter
  
• Jean-Luc David
  
• Ivan Brightly
  
• Chris Dufour
  
• Darrell Norton
  
• Renee Rieser
  
• J. Michael Palermo IV
  
• Christian Weyer
  
• Amanda Murphy
  
• Shane Perran
  
• Scott Fremeau
  
• Matt Gillmore
  
• Melissa Demcsak
  
• DonXML Demcsak
  
• Frank La Vigne
  
• Don Smith
  
• John Bristowe
  
• Scott Hanselman
  
• Juval Lowey

We also had quite a turn-out at the bar later this evening.  Here are some of the people who made it to the bar:

• Carl Franklin
  
• Richard Campbell
  
• Brian Noyes
  
• Tim Huckaby
  
• Michele Leroux Bustamante
  
• Richard Hundhausen
  
• Matt Ranlett
  
• Ingo Rammer

We had a great time!  At the bar, I started out talking with Michael Palermo about our web content management systems.  Both of us have developed one from scratch, so we compared the approaches.  Around 1AM, Don Smith, Carl Franklin, and I went out for a bit of breakfast, and then we called it a night!  The Palermo After Party is already in the planning stages for Friday evening.  Stay tuned for the details.