B# .NET Blog

Just arrived in the RAI for another TechEd. The travel yesterday went really well (Thalys), the hotel is okay (Ibis), so it's waiting for the quality of the event :-). Fingers crossed, but I've a good feeling after attending the two previous TechEd Europes.

At the registration desk, we received our TechEd 2005 bag, which looks better than the one we received last year (it had that ugly - I believe it's Dutch - orange color :p). One of the remarkable cards the delegates find in their bags is a card titled RFID with the following text:

On the front of your Microsoft TechEd 2005 Europe wallet is an RFID device. The device contains a RANDOM NUMBER ONLY, it does not contain any personal data about you and is not linked in any way to your registration or personally identifiable information.

As part of the Microsoft TechEd 2005 Europe keynote demonstration, the RFID device is monitoring the flow of people in and out the pre-conference session rooms and the keynote session room. All monitoring will be switched off after the keynote on Tuesday 5 July 2005. (...)

Sounds nice: a big keynote coming up I guess... As the matter in fact I already have some tangible experience with RFID technology as our local library in Zottegem (the place in Belgium where I live) is one of the first libraries in our country that has secured every single book with an RFID chip. Moreover, the library visitors can register their books themselves, without requiring any assistence from the library staff.

As usual, there's a price to win by participating in this RFID stuff: 5 Creative Labs Media Centers will be distributed by choosing 5 random RFID numbers (grmbl ... I already have this device :d).

Okay, enough for this first post on the TechEd Communications Network of “Mister Big Cheese” (explanation will follow later on, after attending the *mandatory* session “How we built and New and Improved TechEd 2005 Europe IT infrastructure on Friday). For now, everything seems to work smoothly. One hour to go for my preconference “Architecture Boot Camp for Building Connected Systems”, but maybe I'll switch to another room for a couple of moments.