*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

The Elder is officially back from DevLink.  Time to catch up on work, sleep and set the sights on future talks.  Before I put the DevLink memories to bed here is a recap of the conference. 

Thursday

Thursday night as noted here, the speakers ate at Stoney River.  I took pictures of everyone so check out the speaker pictures.  And yes, Wally is in most of them because everyone needs http://www.morewally.com in their life (for those that have been paying attention).   One thing I didn’t post about earlier was I did get into a discussion with Brad Abrams at dinner about Smart Clients, WPF, Silverlight, etc.  It was good to hear where he thinks things are headed with regards to the various technologies.

Friday

Friday morning I had the first session after the key note.  I got there about 30 minutes early and that turned out to be a good thing.  While the room was setup, it wasn’t setup in a conducive manner for giving talks that required programming.  The DevLink folks jumped in and got someone from the University to help out and the problem was solved.  This talk was on “Leveraging Enterprise Library in your Applications”.  Basically the talk was on how to get started with EntLib and how to use the various blocks, the console, etc.  And of course why you would want to use it.  I got a lot of positive comments on the talk and that is good.

After the talk it was back to the speakers room to eat lunch and prepare for the next talk after lunch.  For me the most interesting conversation comes out of the speakers room a lot of times with so much diversity.  When I got there David Laribee, Jeff McWherter, Allan Stevens, Rob Foster, Jon Box, Mark Dunn, Mickey Goussett, Billy Hollis, Rob Howard, David Silverlight and Rob Windsor were all hanging out.  It was quite the room full.  I grabbed a quick sandwich and fired up my demos for the next talk to make sure they worked.

My second talk was on “What’s new for Smart Clients in Visual Studio 2008”.  During the talk Brad Abrams walked in, talking about pressure to perform!  It is amazing how time flies because I had to rush to get done in the end and skip a few demos. 

Later that evening we had a what I thought was a fairly decent little supper at the conference.  Then we had entertainment from a local comedian who was awesome.  After the show was over we sat around and talked it up and then headed to the bar.  A bunch of us rolled out to Jonathan’s Grill and commenced to having drinks.   Good times, good conversation.  Josh Holmes got a head massage at the bar from the waitress which I think was the highlight of the evening.

Saturday

I had to get my oil changed in my truck so I found a local Five-Star Chrysler dealer.  I got back to the conference in time for lunch where I found Mickey, Rob, Jon and Ron Jacobs in the speaker room.   Later Kathleen Dollard, Allan, Jeff and David came in and we got into some pretty good conversation around agile development. 

After the conference a bunch of us went out to Showgun’s and ate some hibachi.   We started out with a reservation for 10 but we had 14 show up.  It was a pretty good crowd to say the least.  Check out the pictures starting here.  After food we headed back to Jonathan’s Grill.  After Jonathan’s several of us rolled downtown to hear some live Nashville music.  I think I was the only person that knew all the songs though.  After that we headed to Waffle House for our forth meal and then back to the hotel.

As you can see it was a great time, the pictures speak for themselves.  Since this is the first conference I’ve ever attended in the South, I have to say that I enjoyed not being the only Southerner.  Many thanks to John Kellar and the volunteers for hosting the conference.  I definitely will be back next year.