Last night was the big mix-and-mingle party at the PURE nightclub in Caesar’s Palace.

I got there around 6:30p, a little after it started, and, after going through a TSA-style checkpoint to get in (I was actually relieved we didn’t have to take our shoes off), I got to start actually meeting some folks.

PURE itself is a pretty nice place inside with lots of little places to sit and gather and talk. Of course, that makes it a problem to find anyone specific you might be looking for because they could be hidden away in any number of little cubby holes. Good food, great drinks, decent music.

At one point The Pussycat Dolls came out and performed. It wasn’t the actual Pussycat Dolls (like, the ones that tour and put out albums) but the performance was the same and it was a lot of fun.

I spent most of the time hanging out with Joe Pruitt, Jon Galloway, Phil Haack, and Miguel de Icaza. Hanselman made the rounds, and toward the end of the night on the way out the door we bumped into Clemens Vasters and Michele Bustamante. I tried to find Atwood, but never seemed to cross paths with him even though he was there. I think I crossed paths with Anders Hejlsberg at one point but wasn’t sure and he seemed to be on a mission headed somewhere so I didn’t get a chance to say hi.

Around 9:45p they opened the club up to the general public, and while I planned on staying, the way they did it was by locking different sections down so if you left the section you couldn’t get back in, and drinks started costing upwards of $10 for a $5 drink. Thanks, but no thanks. Hanselman left, I left, and several other folks left (though I got a Twitter from Haack at 2:30a saying he was just then leaving).

All in all, a great party. I know where my conference registration fee went.

While that was good, the following several hours weren’t as good. The Venetian is under some level of construction, so they shut off the water to the rooms at midnight and scheduled the water to be back on at 4:00a. They left us bottled water to drink, but that didn’t stop me from having to get dressed at 3:00a, go down 20 floors, and cross the lobby just to go to the bathroom.

Oh, and water didn’t get restored until about 7:30a. Hot water showed up closer to 8:30a, which means I missed breakfast and most of my first morning session. Lame.

Anyway, I’m in a Silverlight development session now. I like what I see. Sounds like there are a lot of folks in a “programmable web” session, but since this is a two-part session, I didn’t want to miss the first part. I’ll have to watch the video of the programmable web session.