My first inclination was to start this post off all matter-of-factly as so many developers do when they get back from these types of conferences. You know, dropping names like Scott and Rob, Markus and Juval as if they are all peers (OK, some of them really are). I even snapped some pictures that will be posted in the gallery shortly and thought of adding some trite captions such as “Juval spinning C# Generics”, or something cool sounding like that.
Truth is, this was the best conference I have ever attended. Oh, did I mention it was my first conference I've ever attended?
The event ran from Sunday Nov 7th through Wednesday (do the math, c'mon its just date math) and was full of excellent topics ranging from various sessions on .NET 2.0, to Component Oriented Development and how to discipline back tacking stored procedures.
It was a great opportunity to get out of the office for a few days- putting off my very pressing projects- and get in a classroom environment and just soak it all in. I must say that I learned something in each and every session.
It was great to meet and listen to some of my favorite authors/mentors including Juval Lowy and Markus Egger. I was even goofy enough to have Juval sign my/his “Programming .NET Components” book. Fortunately there was a guy behind me with the same plan, so that makes at least two of us!
My only complaint was that there were so many great topics/sessions to choose from that it was often tough to choose. Ideally this would be a 5 day shindig, but we all have jobs to do. Oh yeah, would have liked more time for Q&A too.
All in all, this was a fantastic conference and I would highly recommend it to anyone, regardless of where you are in your career path.
As mentioned earlier, I tried to snap off at least one shot of each session and have included these in the gallery.