OK, believe it or not. It's just after 1PM on Monday night after DevConnections in Vegas and I'm just beginning to relax for the first time since I got home. This has been a great week of speaking and partying (as much as an old married man like me can) in Vegas followed by a four-hour-that-should-have-been-less-than-one-hour-from-Philly-to-Hartford-because-of-the-freakin-weather-that-made-me-postpone-dotnetrocks plane ride, getting to the studio 15 minutes before recording the first Mondays show.
The broadcast, of course, was 23 minutes late due to some last-minute hardware swapping, and in SPITE of all that we got a good recording. After staying up all night Geoff and I got the first show out, including a replacement interview because the first one was rushed and incomplete.
But let me get back to DevConnections. This is truly a class-A conference. It's no wonder that speakers like Juval Lowy, Don Kiely, Dan Appleman, Michele Leroux Bustamante, Kimberly Tripp, Bill Vaughn, (and yours truly, of course) come back time and time again. They get comp air fare and rooms, AND they get paid on time. Also, it's always in a great place. This one was at Mandalay Bay in LV. Nice! Absolutely sweet location. Great food, great entertainment. Star Trek, the Experience! I mean, come on! Dan Appleman, Geoff, and I went through it and had dinner at Quark's place. Surreal. On top of that, there were over 1500 attendees! Apparently the word is getting out. The next one is this Spring in Orlando at the Hyatt Grand Cypress Resort. This place is over the top.
I get to participate as the sort-of emcee of a couple events. I moderate the Q&A sessions. Moderate is a fancy word for run up and down the ballroom with a microphone fielding questions for the panel, which always includes some heavyweights from Microsoft. Where else can you ask questions directly to people like Scott Guthrie in front of over 1000 people. I also gave away a Harley. Well, I didn't BUY it, but I got to announce the winner. You know, it's the little victories in life that are the sweetest. Well, I enjoy making people laugh, even at my expense, which is not hard to do.
I put together a Fundamentals Track with Juval this year, and it was a hit. We had one room dedicated to attendees who were just beginning to experience .NET technologies. Dan Appleman's talk on Cryptography 101 drew over 200 people. That number is from memory. If I get corrected, I'll update this entry, so check back. :-)
I also gave some good talks there. a) .NET Essentials, a technical overview of all things .NET. b) What every VB.NET Programmer Should Know about Garbage Collection, and c) So you THINK you know what an Object is..., a discussion of reference types, value types, casting, overriding, and shadowing. Markus Egger also did a fundamentals talk in two parts on OOP and it was very well received. We're going to do the fundamentals track again in the Spring.
I also did a hands-on post-conference tutorial on building an n-tier smart-client in VB.NET with autodeployment. Time ran out at the end and the firewall was keeping me from testing it for real by copying the .exe to my server in CT and trying to run it remotely. Then James, the IT wiz of DevConnections, came in and in 5 minutes had me connected to my server. The rest of the demo went without a hitch.
So, it seems that interest in VB.NET is growing. We've already got 250 people registered for the January CodeCamp in Boston in which I spend a day building an n-tier app (much like at DevConnections). Demand for on-site VB.NET classes is peaking as well. This is all good news.
The .NET Rocks! party was of course, awesome. Already blogged it. Well, I guess that's it. I love being involved with DevConnections. It's always fun, and I always learn a lot just by hanging out with the speakers and the brainiacs who attend it. I hope you'll consider coming to Orlando in the spring.
As for .NET Rocks!, people are starting to freak out thinking Rory's not doing it anymore. Nothing doing! It's just been two weeks of schedule nightmares, that's all. He wasn't able to record tonights show because he's working. But, with most certainty I can say he'll be back on Friday for next week's show.
Speaking of DNR, you're not going to believe how awesome this week's show is (it will be online by Wed. morning). It started as a Java discussion with Mark Pollack and Ted Neward, and then Ted invited Don Box to join us, and I basically sat back and let the three of them talk for 2 freaking hours! The fur was flying a couple times, and the discussion was great! I added what I could to it, but I was really outclassed by these guys. Mere mortals should study this discussion in great detail. Lots of good stuff. I'll post it's availability here, and of course you can subscribe to the podcast feeds to automatically download it.