Ok, I said I would post a summary of my trip to HDC in Omaha so here it is while I grill up a couple of fat ass steaks. This was really the first developers conference I had been to. I've made my way to a couple of MSDN events before, but not a "conference".  To be honest, for the most part it was a huge waste of time for me. Sorry to disappoint, but I'm not one to bullshit - I tell things straight up just like they are.  That's not to say I didn't learn anything because I did, it's just that I think there are better ways to learn.

Some of the session's were all about the presenter's book, website, or their attempt to entertain a crowd of programmers and not so much about the technology itself. That I don't really care for, especially when what was supposed to be the meat of their presentation contained nearly all bone and no meat. Other's were about new MS technologies (WPF, ASP.NET AJAX, AJAX Control Toolkit, and SQL Server 2005, LINQ to name a few)  that I had already had the privilege of working with due to the super progressive .NET shop I work in. Excuse me while I squeeze some fresh lime on those fat steaks...

All of the good presentations I went to where presented by Microsoft employees. There was an excellent presentation on IIS 7, but by far the best presentations where given by Scott Guthrie who according to his blog "builds a few products for Microsoft". That's pretty modest considering he heads the Developer Division at Microsoft, not to mention that the word on the street is that he is being primed for Steve Ballmer's job!  Friday morning he gave the keynote which was made up primarily of the capabilities of Silverlight. The presentation was fantastic and when i saw it I just thought, "Oh,i t's WPF for the web." - so that I get.  I'm not sure how excited I am about working with databinding in XAML, but I'll get there eventually.

Then in the afernoon ScottGu gave an awesome look into web development with Visual Studio 2008. One of my favorite features of the new IDE, is that it includes Javascript intellisense....friggin' SWEEET! There is much more built into VS 2008 but the Javascript intellisense is the thing that stands out in my mind. The info he gave on LINQ (Language Integrated Query) and the new Expressions software packages rocked as well.

I think developer conferences are a good change of pace and a good way to learn about cutting edge development tools, but to really learn about new technology, you just need to crack open your laptop (and your mind) and get to work figuring them out for yourself!

web development conferences