A technical conference in Las Vegas on St Patrick’s Day is a bizarre blend of visuals. At 7am, where else could you find under-dressed women with huge shamrock earrings, morose single men nursing a beer and a dwindling stack of betting chips, and a sea of suited businessmen on their way to some other shindig in the bowels of the huge convention center here?

As I write this, the pre-conference sessions are underway, and it’s a time of conversions: from developer to designer, from Flash/Flex to Silverlight, and from “meaningless” (?!) web development to the semantic web.

A couple of choice quotes:

• “If you ask me certain questions, I may have to give you a nod and wink and say, ‘ask me again after tomorrow.’”
• “Creative directors always want ponies, but if you live on a second-floor apartment, you can’t have one.”

Meanwhile the keynote rehearsals are well underway here on the fifth floor. It’s always interesting to watch how things come together over the last twenty-four hours: seeing the final polish applied to demos that a week ago looked a little shaky,discovering which presenters are the most comfortable on-stage,and occasionally cutting demos that are too long or edgy. Sometimes it’s even a point of closure for product messaging discussions, as two different teams hear how each other are positioning their technologies.

So far things are going pretty smoothly in rehearsals:. a pretty relaxed atmosphere, lots of cool Silverlight 3 demos and a number of surprises are waiting in the wings. For many of my Microsoft colleagues, the keynote is the culmination of many months of hard work, and also means a sudden switch from radio silence to shouting from the rooftops about what they’ve been working on.

Tune in here tomorrow at 9am Pacific (GMT-7) for the first keynote, won’t you? We’ll be providing a full run-down of all the announcements in the form of a live-blog, with a little analysis of what this means for you as a developer or designer. We’ll also have coverage of selected breakout sessions and other news from the event. See you then!