The last few days at DevConnections were fun and exhausting! I did two talks on Thursday which, for me, somewhat consumes the day, since I want to keep focused on my content. The first, a session on persisting ink on the web (getting the inkdata out of the clientside ink control over to the server and back which is tricky business, indeed!) and the second which was about using the new Asynchronous features in ASP.NET 2.0 (Async pages, tasks, the event-based async web services and using the async SqlCommands in ASP.NET).
I have a lot invested in these sessions and think they went well. Hopefully the attendees would agree. The second talk was standing room only, which is always a nice sight.
In between the two talks was the Women in I.T. luncheon which was also packed. I totally enjoyed the conversation at the table I sat at. There was a broad range of experience represented there, from women with stay-at-home dads manning the fort, to women who, like me, have no children and have a little more flexibility to travel. Two women are in a company where, although they have so much to offer, they don't get heard and they really do feel, from plenty of experience that it is truly, in this day and age, a gender issue. They have even sought out women higher up to potentially mentor them within the company, but those opportunities seem to be few and far between. Another woman was very happy to tell us that her own manager makes a point of making sure her voice is heard.
After the lunch, after my session (the last of the day) was the closing session of the conference, a Q&A Panel with the speakers and lots of giveaways. The Q&A didn't go as well as in the past, partly because of some audio problems and partly because of the variety of attendees - devs who weren't so interested in the questions asked by the admins and vice versa. So they just kept calling out for “more giveaways”. Oh well, I had a mic that worked so at least got to joke around a bit.
Afterwards, I actually got out of the building for the first time all week. A bunch of us walked down to the Bellagio for their highly rated buffet dinner. That was fun and yummy. We lost a few of the guys on the way back as the call of the gaming tables was too strong for them to resist!
Today I did a 3 hour session on Advanced Data Access. I could talk all day about ado.net, but had to stop myself at the end of my time.
I'm hoping that my throat will soon recover from the combination of smoke, dry air and lots and lots of talking.
I'm now sitting at McCarren Airport (free wi-fi yay!) waiting for my midnight flight home. Red eye, indeed!