Last month I attended the 2-day Asia-Pacific Microsoft SharePoint Conference, held at the Hilton Hotel in Sydney.

It proved to be the ideal timing for me, as I've been tinkering around the edges of SharePoint 2007 for most of this year.

There were lots of good technical talks, though I was a bit disappointed at the number of delays for sessions starting because of speaker's laptops being messed up, virtual machines not working or network connections not connecting.

One useful thing I did pick up was that there are a number of handy tools people are writing that will make developing sites in SharePoint a lot easier.

The venue was excellent - we stayed at the Hilton which is probably the fanciest place I can remember staying at! Very comfortable rooms, and the catering for the event was great.

The Tuesday night "entertainment" turned out to be a very creative "Wild West Saloon Bar" theme - complete with lots of gambling tables. I grabbed some food to eat, but then left early (I don't gamble, so there wasn't much attraction to staying around) and saw Spiderman 3 at the Darling Harbour Imax. Seeing it on the very big screen is one way to realise that Tobey Maquire and Kirsten Dunst don't have perfect skin after all!