So, the second day's down, and was a pretty good day… I did find out that the Vendor hall wasn't as good as I though, and they have been closing it during the sessions, which I suppose makes sense, but is annoying if you want to skip a session and check out some products… Oh well. I caught a couple good sessions today, starting with Todd Bleeker's Workflow from SPD to VS. It was a fast and furious session, and he didn't get a chance to complete the entire process, but he did get to show us some critical transformation steps, including an inside step that is not currently documented anywhere from Microsoft (although Paul Schaeflein will be blogging this very extensively)… this is the parent node that has to be added to the xml file for the Initiation Page… Specifically this is the <Instantiation_FieldML> tag for the Fields block and the <Initiation_FieldML> tag for the Parameters block. I look forward to seeing what Paul documents for this process…
I tried hitting a session from some of the Rangers on Performence, but the session before it over-ran by about 30 minutes (yes, not 3 or 5 minutes, but 30 minutes!)… By the time I got in there, the place was packed from people who just stayed from the previous session and folks that came in on the over-run and took seats… With it being standing room only, I bowed out and took the time to catch up on some work… It looked like it would be a good session, nothing revolutionary, but still good content. Not sure if thy hit Web Gardens, but I know they talked about BLOB caching and output caching, both of which are two edged swords that can really help, or waste memory, depending on your usage profile.
I grabbed a repeat performance from both Andrew Connell and Todd Baginski, who both have given these presentations a number of times… As usual, they both hit the mark with their content… Andrew's topic was deploying solutions in a publishing environment, but it really was repeatable, dependable development process in SharePoint. He blazes through it pretty quick as he is very familiar with the content, and covers a lot of ground. I've put some of his practices in to play from the last time I caught his presentation, but wanted the refresher for dealing with content types and site columns in features. He was unfortunately struggling with a rough cough, but his voice held through… Hope your feeling better AC!
Todd has a great presentation on BDC utilization and how easy it is, which I caught months ago, but haven't used. As usual, Todd is a great presenter with a lot of knowledge, and is always willing to share that knowledge, even offline through emails. Todd wrapped his entire demo site up in a site template that he is posting on his site… Go check it out even if you missed the conference… He's included sample code and everything…
I ended with a session by Bill English from Mindsharp on Search. He gave some great diagrams and discussion on Search on the theory behind making things searchable. He focused on why taking the time to build a taxonomy is important, as well as the role of social computing (MySites) in finding information. It was primarily a slide-deck presentation, compared to AC's and Todd's mostly demo sessions, but had some good diagrams and architecture information. One great quote he through out is that "dumping file-shares and folders of documents in to SharePoint with Taxonomy and metadata is just automating Chaos…", playing of course on the quote from Dorothy Graham.
Good content, and tomorrow looks to be even better… 
josef.nielsen