Bizarre schedule at Worldwide Partner Conference

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  ast year I attended Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in Minneapolis and loved every minute of it. It was remarkably well attended. It had good technical content. It featured lots of hands-on labs. The networking opportunities (both with Microsoft employees and Microsoft partners) are unparalleled: where else can you have 7,000 employees and partners in the same city at the same time?

They also take care of you well. Decent food the whole time, and a good party -- actually, some of the best networking of the whole conference happened at the party; last year Hootie and the Blowfish played it.

This year, I was looking forward to the party not just for the networking: local boys done good Train are playing it! Wow - a band I'd actually like to see.

One big problem: I just started setting my schedule for next week's events, and guess what I noticed? Train is playing Thursday night--after the conference has ended. Yup. The conference runs July 11-13, and Train is playing the night of the 13th. So for those attendees who happen to live in Boston, what a great opportunity! For those who are taking Friday off of work, how nice! For the 90% of us who are travelling Thursday night so we can work on Friday...um, thanks for thinking of us, Microsoft.

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