Well, that was a whirlwind day. The first day of VSLive! was basically a big Microsoft commercial (which isn't entirely horrible).
There basically wasn't anything that hasn't been covered already in the many MSDN developer centers, blogs, and/or developer content sites. That being said, it's a different story to see some of the stuff done in person. Some of the stuff they did with Smart tags was really cool. One of the demos had them wiring up a custom smart tag that was deployed using Click Once, and integrated with Outlook. It tagged any contacts referenced in the body of an email ... activating the smart tag pulled up a custom stock portfolio report/application for that person.
Some of the Data binding things are really cool as well. The ObjectDataSource with the GridView component in ASP.NET 2.0 is a killer combination. And on the winforms side of things, the new GUI Widgets that let you write custom renderers are really cool ... very much like the Sandbar controls that you can use in winforms 1.1.
I installed the Visual Studio 2005 last friday only to find that they gave us new bits that had the first community preview of the Team System stuff ... so the first half of the day I spent uninstalling and reinstalling Whidbey. Fun times ... it's crashed a few times throughout the day but I can live with it. It's a good thing this is on my laptop which has nothing of importance on it ;-)