Dev Connections Day 3

Well, it's 5:30 on day 3. The day isn't over yet. We are going back at 7:30 for the party. Free steak and chicken. One thing I can say is the food has been excellent here.

I originally planned on blogging the actual information in the sessions, but I just don't have time to get to that, so I'm going with more of a quick summary and review. I have about 5 of the sessions I'm going to go back and write more in depth summaries and will either post them here or at www.workagile.com (when I get it up and running).

The sessions were 1 hour long yesterday and we had a keynote in the morning and 4 sessions. Today, the sessions went to 1 hour 15 minutes and we had 5 sessions.

8:00 - 9:15
SOA and SharePoint - Using Web Services to aggregate disparate data sources

It was a mouthful of a title, unfortunately the content didn't live up to the title. Bob Mixon is a low talker. He kept getting off track telling us about how his system is setup or how does this nifty post build event. It reminded me of when you are replacing someone at a job and they are leaving. The last day when they are supposed to be training you, they keep bouncing around saying "oh, yeah, this is neat, wait I have to show you this over here and that over there."

9:30 - 10:45
How the Core ASP.NET Engine Works

This was really a filler session for me. There was nothing else I wanted to go to. But Rick Strahl blew me away. I think he knows more about the internals of ASP.NET than most of the MSFT guys. Excellent speaker and very knowledgeable. As he said at the beginning, there wasn't a lot of practical take-away information, but it's good to know how the "magic" happens.

10:45 - 11:15
Coffee break. Cody, Lee (another co-worker from a different dept) and I compared notes on our sessions. I drank a Mt Dew and a Starbucks Mocha iced coffee and I can feel the caffeine coarsing through my veins.

11:15 - 12:30
Building a Corporate Telephone Directory w/ SharePoint

He could have given us all the useful information in 10 minutes. This plain sucked and I don't want to waste anymore time typing about it.

12:30 - 2:00
Lunch (very good lasagna and meatballs. And some kind of vegetable dish that was heavy on the zucchini. Normally I don't like zucchini but this was awesome)

Cody and I walked around the hotel and tried to teach a parrot to say "asshole." It kept saying "Hello" and "cracker." Stupid bird.



They gave away the Harley. A Russian girl won it. They asked if she likes motorcycles and she said her boyfriend would. I bet he will. If she plays it right, she can trade that motorcycle for a ring.

2:00 - 3:15
Building Web Parts the Smart Way

Great job by Patrick Tisseghem. Great info on the SmartPart which I guess I will be using soon.

3:15 - 3:45
Break

I am taking all of my white shirts and throwing them away. On the flight down here, I was wearing a white polo. I was eating a muffin. I dropped a bit of muffin onto my shirt, where it left a stain! Who but me can get a muffin stain on them? During the break, I was eating a very tasty dessert. It had a plump, juicy raspberry, I poked it with my fork to eat it and it squirted its juice all over my 2nd white polo. Only black shirts for me from now on.

3:45 - 5:00
Advanced Web Part Development

The presenter, Scot Hillier, was very knowledgeable and a great presenter. The content just wasn't very useful because it dealt with building web parts in .Net 1.1 and I work exclusively in 2.0.

I may post more after the party, or I may not. Depends on if anything cool happens.