Back from speaking at VSLive! San Francisco

I just got back from my annual appearance at VSLive! San Francisco (it seems that I have been speaking at one or more VSLive events since February 2000)

This year's event, the first under the new management, had a good turnout and was well-run.   For me personally, it was a rather short, intense, jet-lagged trip - but quite successful.   I gave a total of 3 presentations, all in one day.  Two of them were on SQL Server Compact Edition - the first was an overview and the second was a more advanced look at current and future synchronization techniques.  All the demos worked just fine (even the Merge Replication, which can sometimes act "funny") and the sessions were well received. 

My other presentation was something completely new for me - Mashups.  But not just mashups - mashups that are developed as Winforms, rather than browser / AJAX apps.  I had a lot of fun preparing and learning for this presentation - there are alot of cool resources out there.  And the Virtual Earth control is very powerful and simple to use !  The main demo of my session was what I called "My Northwind Mashup" - I selected rows from the Northwind customers table, converted their addresses to Latitude and Longitude using the Yahoo Geo-coding service, and then plotted their locations on a Virtual Earth map - all in a Winform !  Is that cool or what ?!