I was a little late for the keynote @8AM, but I don’t think I missed much. I expected some kind of strategic speech, but it was yet another demo with code samples, etc., some of which failed to work.

Pete Brown, Rich Dudley and Vishwas Lele gave excellent presentations on WPF 4.5 and various aspects of WinRT. There was certain overlap (async keyword was mentioned, like, 50 times total :)), but not too much to make it boring.

Rocky Lhotka tried (unsuccessfully) to alienate every web developer in the audience by saying that he does not know JavaScript and does not care, and other things like that. Nonetheless, his presentation was quite good. Everyone seems to agree that “the days of plugin-based browser applications (read: Silverlight) are coming to an end”.

They were other entertaining quotes you would probably not find on the slides, such as “google it with Bing”, and “the first thing we write is ‘Hello World’, the next thing we write is a book”. Life of Microsoft evangelists is not always easy.