Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tmurphy/archive/2013/06/27/microsoft-build-2013ndashday-1-summary.aspx

I’m happy to be at BUILD this week, mainly because my flights finally got me here late on Tuesday.  My biggest complaints so far are the flights and the hotel.  It seems that almost every flight into San Francisco were delayed multiple hours.  The Sequester so lovingly forced on America by congress means that the airport was short controllers.   That, along with poor weather and airport construction meant most people were 2-3 hours late arriving.  Add on top of that the fact that the hotel that I picked durring registration is absolutely horrid.  It looks like something out of a ghost hunters show and smells like it too.  I think if Microsoft is going to select a hotel they need to make sure that it is adequate.

Rant over!

So what happened the first day?  Steve Balmer started off the keynote along with Julie Larson-Green and a cast of others.  We finally found out that there were around six thousand people attending BUILD and that the focus this year would be Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Azure.  For the rest of the keynote I am going to have a separate post.

You can’t have a Microsoft conference without some fun.  This year they have a hunt for pins that represent different gestures in Windows 8.  I got all of mine.  Now they just need to pull my name.

The sessions I attended were really good. They covered live tiles, what’s new in XAML and building Windows Phone UIs presented by Kraig Brockschmidt, Tim Heuer and Shawn Oster respectively.  These will also be covered in separate posts.

The exhibit area was interesting, but somewhat disappointing.  TechEd 2012 I think was better organized and better staffed by the vendors.  It also seemed that the Microsoft teams’ booths were also in need of some organization and staffing.

Overall it was a really fun day capped off by all six thousand attendees standing in like to get their Acer 8” tables and Surface Pros.  What a day!  Stay tuned for follow up posts.