DevConnections this year is huge! They have pulled all 8 shows together (check the DevConnections home page to see) bringing together nearly 5000 attendees, 200 speakers and a huge # of vendors. Walking throught the expo hall reminds me of TechEd.
The first day of the show is called Microsoft Day where all of the sessions are given by Microsoft speakers. Although I spent most of the day doing other things, I did attend the morning keynote by Scott Guthrie where lots of things were announced. Naturally my favorite part of the session was when Ben Noonan from Burton Snowboards showed off their AJAX enabled site that they are currently developing. Burton is located in Burlington. When the VTdotNET user group started up we had a lot of meetings there in our first year. (Burton is currently looking for an Oracle DBA, by the way.)
I also attended Scott's session on LINQ for SQL in ASP.NET that he did in the afternoon. Looking back on that talk, I can't believe it was only an hour long. I was sitting with a friend from Vermont who is also attending the show and kept want to jump out of my seat and shout hellelujah at the things he was demonstrating. It's a little embarrassing.
One of the funny things here was that Greg Proops who you may know from Who's Line is it Anyway, was hired to interview attendees for a Microsoft video. He definitely stands out in the crowd of geeks but even though he's pretty much a big star in the improv comedy world, he was pretty gracious talking with people. I loved that when he interviewed me, he brought up the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which I told him I'm a huge fan of (in fact blogged about it in June after Gates made his announcement about shifting his focus to there.)
Today was the first of the two days that us 3rd party (non-Microsoft) speakers present. Billy Hollis had 4 talks today and has more coming which is astonishing - especially since those talks were all on totally differents topics. I talked with Sue Mosher, a speaker in the Office Connections show and she did three today and looked pretty fresh at the end of the day.
I attended a talk by Bill Vaughn in the morning and as someone who wants to be a more effective presenter, it was great to experience how Bill communicates and shares information with people. The man is a total card and he uses humor naturally and very effectively to demonstrate a lot of points. Another thing I liked, which I've always noticed impressed me about people like Don Box and Tim Ewald (Don had a big impact on a lot of Developmentor trainers when he was there0 was that he wasn't trying to do a brain dump session with too much stuff packed into it and was able to deliver his lessons in a natural and relaxed way.
The Mobile team is here in force (one of the shows is Mobile Connections) with all kinds of toys to show off such as tablets and UMPCs. They also have a hands on lab which has been very busy during the whole show. They are also giving a way UMPCs during the conference to attendees which is cool.
I did my first talk in the afternoon and it was in a cavernous room with about 1000 seats. I decided to start the session on time rather than waiting for the room to be filled. (that's just a joke). I did a session that was an overview of the many options we have to wander through when creating new asp.net 2.0 applications as well as the compilation and deployment options which nearly traumatized me when I had to deploy my first asp.net 2.0 app. Luckily Web Application Projects and Web Deployment Projects have come to the rescue. Rather than go into all of these technologies in depth, I was able to cover the broad spectrum of all of the options and try to present enough insight on each one so that people could make informed choices and not just take what's handed to them out of the box.
One of the big treats for me today was getting an opportunity to sit and chat with Dmitry Robsman for a while. Dmitry is the guy who wrote the asynchronous pages and tasks goo in ASP.NET and is *the* man with all things asynchronous in asp.net. He also wrote the RSS Toolkit which I have written about as well (including an article in ASPNetPro recently.) He was very generous in spending this time with me helping me have a better understanding of what's going on in the threading so that not only grok it better myself, but share that with others when I present on or write about these tools. Dmitry is putting the RSS Toolkit out on CodePlex and is looking for someone to help coordinate. I told him that my biggest wish for the toolkit was that it could have asynchronous functionality. Check his blog for more info on that.
I have two more talks tomorrow - one on Asynchrounous ASP.NET 2.0 and the other on Persisting Ink on the Web. Both session are in one hour time slots, so maintaining the nice casual pace that I admired Bill Vaughan pulling off may not be doable for me. I have a lot I want to cover. :-)
Read the DevConnections Wrap-Up post!