It is 8:00am and I am not fully awake yet but have made it down to (or up to I guess since I came from California) the Microsoft Conference Center. I just have to say, I wish ALL conferences were this wired. Every seat has hook-ups for power and of course free Wi-Fi and an individual speaker at each seat.
This makes it SOOOO easy. We are waiting for Scott Guthrie to do the opening monologue (sorry, I mean keynote speech). As part of the registration for this conference, you had the ability to schedule a 1 on 1 with one of the Wintelect guys. I have mine set for 10:45 this morning. This is slightly odd because it is during one of the sessions. I guess will have to walk in late. I tried to get advanced notice of when it would happen but did not find out until I registered.
Anyway, ...........
Well the keynote is done. It was a pretty cool talk. He went through the development cycle that is used at Microsoft, the methodologies they use (UML?? What's UML - Word Doc's very interesting) and the tools they use in the process.
NEWS ALERT!!!
What really caught my ear was actually after his keynote. I was packing up to go to another room and I caught him talking about DotNetNuke. He was talking to someone about how much testing they are doing with DNN and the Whidbey Beta 2. Cool. Looks like I smell a book re-write :)
OK. The rest of the day was spent with Jeffery Richter of Wintellect. I sat through his sessions on Exception handling, and building extensible applications.
He went though stuff like hosting the .Net process, Remoting, Reflection and the like. Except for the fact that he went over each session by about 20 minutes, the presentations were fantastic. This is not one of those Fluff conferences. He really gets into the nitty griddy of code.
Great stuff.
So yesterday, I think I told you that they have a soccer field on the MS campus. Well on the way back to my room I found out that the field had more than one use. While I was crossing campus I came across a helicopter about to take off from the soccer field. So of course I thought that was cool and wanted to take a picture of it.
My guess is that it was Mr. Bill (Or someone else important) because when I tried to take these pictures, I was attacked ( well just kind of shooed away) by the MS Security team.
The picture is a bit blurry because I was actually shooting video when he chased me off. He was not running towards me but it was definitely almost a jog. :) I guess Bill is shy.
Anyway, it was a fun day. Unfortunately, I have to do some work tonight.
I am looking forward to tomorrow. HTTPModules, HTTPHandlers, & Threading. You can never have too many sessions on these fun topics.
Happy Programing.
Doc