I finally jumped on the RSS bandwagon and tried out a few RSS readers last night, finally choosing Omea Pro from JetBrains.  I went through the gamut of standard Windows RSS aggregators and couldn’t find one that really fit my needs.  Omea has come closest and gives me a couple bonus features, like integrating with all facets of Oulook and file searching a la Google Desktop Search.  The interface gives me a single view of all of my feeds, all of my email, my Outlook taks, indexed files, and a variety of other things.

Yes, I know NewsGator has their Outlook plugin dealie, but in my opinion, it sucked, the biggest peeve being that it shared my folder list with Outlook.  I already have several trillion sub-folders in Outlook, and adding a bunch more for feeds was unsavory and required too much scrolling.

So, I now have all of my usual daily reads setup as feeds in Omea, notifications when new articles get posted, Outlook integrated so I can view my email right along with my feed goodness….but do I like it?  I don’t know yet.  I feel overwhelmed with information now  Before I’d hit a website, scroll until I found something interesting, and read.  Now, I really have to see each and every article posted on each feed (without setting up filters or searches, I guess).

It just seems there’s now far more information than I ever realized was there.  Is that good or bad?  Hmmm….

ASPSOFT has developed a new website that allows matching an email address to a picture, allowing one to electronically "puttting a face with a name".  Check it out at www.email2face.com and add yourself to the repository, or search for a colleague.

And MIX 06 is officially wrapped up.  Overall, I found today to not be much better than yesterday.  There were fewer sessions today, and they seemed to be even less technical than the ones from Monday and Tuesday.

Not the worst conference in the universe, but certainly nowhere near the best.  Maybe I’m just not the right audience for this.  Or maybe I’m just being overly critical.

I’m curious what others thought of the conference and if MS will do it again next year.  

Am I the only one unimpressed with this conference so far?  It all seems really fluffy and glossy with no real deep content.  The keynotes are all Microsoft propoganda, and every session I’ve been to about Atlas/AJAX has presented me the same things over and over again.  How many times do I need to see how to add an UpdatePanel and an UpdateProgress control to an ASP.NET page?

All of the WPF sessions have been pretty lame, too.  Great, we’ve got the layout panels, we can zoom graphics, write XAML, etc.  Show us how we can use it to achieve a real-world objective.  Not that I’m fully convinced WPF has a real-world function as of yet.  It’s pretty, but where do I use that in my patient tracking healthcare application or accounting-type app?  Or perhaps I’m just not the target audience for that.

On the upside, one session today was really informative, and that was one on AJAX.  Lots of good content there, especially dealing with navigation and how to handle forward/back buttons in the AJAX world.  Additionally, I got to play with some Origami devices today.  I wasn’t overly impressed, but they were prototype devices.  I thought they were a bit heavy and awkward and I don’t see the benefit over a small form-factor tablet PC.  I can see a 2nd generation of that being small and light enough to be useful, though.

One more day….let’s hope it improves…

You know, because I updated the last one so frequently...