I had a great experience yesterday.  As my four readers know, I love to hear and see what customers are doing with Microsoft dev tech.  I was sitting in a session room waiting for it to start when a guy goes by that looks awfully familiar.  We do the quick "do I know you look", and then Wally introduces himself.  Wally works for Starkey Labs, which is a leader in hearing aids and hearing related products.  We start of by chatting about the conference, Vegas, etc. and then I ask Wally what he is up to with .NET at his job.  I come away with two great stories:

1.  Wally himself works on a project that provides software to the front offices of clinics.  The short version that I got is that it is WinForms application that uses ClickOnce to deploy and update itself to Starkey's clinic customers.  Talk about a great software story.  Easily distribute code, update and maintain it regularly, keep your customers coming back for more.  They had some issues going from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0 due to changes in the security model, but they use a simple "install" routine that makes the necessary CASPOL adjustments and they are good to go.

2.  The other thing that is going on is another group at Starkey is using WPF to do modeling of audio signals for their hearing devices (or at least that is how I understood it - sorry Wally if I blew that!).  Talk about the text book example of where WPF plays a great role in data visualization.  That team is using WPF 3D (even more cool!) and doing some very slick work to model the acoustics that they have to deal with in their particular application. 

Two great examples of what is going on with a real world .NET customer.  I grabbed Wally's email address and will try and sync back up with him and the other guys to get more info about what they are up to.