Report on DevDays, Hartford
We got off to a good start at DevDays in Hartford, CT Tuesday, March 2. The 2 tracks were focused on Smart Clients and Web applications. The infamous Patrick Hynds (MSDN Regional Dir. for Boston) and I again decided to tag-team and deliver the keynote together. Normally, the RD for the region delivers the keynote solo, but we figured out that we get twice as good double-exposure by teaming up. It's also a lot easier to watch 2 nerds on stage than one.
At the last DevDays I had the highest keynote score in the world (out of all the RDs) - not something I use to one-up the rest of the RDs. It just shows that while they are busy thinking about programming, I'm thinking about showbiz. Pat Hynds was either 2nd or 3rd as I recall. That year we came up with a Matrix theme. One track was the blue pill and the other track was the red pill, or something like that.
This year the theme was toys. We are now like James Bond visiting Q's lab looking at all the gadgets (Whidbey). The difference is that in 9 months all the toys will be at Wal-Mart. :-) Believe it or not, I played and sang my song, Toy Boy during the keynote, which started the day right.
Rory did the very first smart client talk, discussing good design and patterns. Chris Pels did the next talk in that track, on securely accessing data with ADO.NET. Then I did the next talk, Securing Smart Client applications. I thought it went well. The content was great. Our friends at Vertigo Software created it, and I thought they did an excellent job. Thom Robbins from Microsoft did the last talk in the smart client track, on deploying smart clients.
On the ASP.NET side, Pat and and his protege' Duane Laflotte - and Julia Lerman did the ASP.NET Track.
Overall, we did a great job, I thought. If you're a .NET geek and haven't signed up for DevDays, register online now! It's less than a hundred bucks!