*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

I’ve been wanting to post this for a few days now but wanted to wait until I got the *official* email.  This morning it finally came so I can break the news that I’ll be doing a full day pre-conference session at TechEd 2010 in New Orleans, LA.

The conference is officially slated for June 7-10th this year but as typical with most conferences like this there is a pre-conference that happens the day before the conference.  The pre-conference sessions are typically full day lengthy sessions whereby attendees can get deeper into a technology.  This year I will be doing a pre-conference entitled “.Net From Scratch” (at least I think that is going to be the title). 

.Net from scratch will start attendees at the beginning of what .Net is and work through all the layers of the platform building upon one another.  Some of you may recall my “Back to the Basics” series and this is born right out of that.  I know there are attendees that go to these larger events where some get their first exposure to the .Net platform.  There are a multitude of reasons why this is but I’ve never seen any sessions tailored to bringing new people into the platform.  The bottom line is if you don’t have a way to get people introduced the platform, the platform doesn’t grow.  Most of the time speakers like to talk about the new shiny thing, leaving out those people that are just getting started.  Someone has to fill this gap and I am truly passionate about filling this void. 

What is the moral of the story?  If you are going to TechEd 2010 and don’t know .Net but want to learn it come to this pre-conference session. Or if you know someone that is going to TechEd that is trying to learn .Net and the platform tell them about this pre-conference session.  It’ll be a great primer for things they’ll see and learn later in the week.

I was wanting to host a crawfish boil at my house (which is only 1.5 hours from New Orleans) on the Saturday before TechEd this year but I don’t know if I’ll be able to prepare all that I have to prepare for and host a crawfish boil.  We’ll see how things pan out.  If you’d be interested in attending a Pre-TechEd Crawfish Boil in Hattiesburg at my house on Saturday before TechEd let me know (comment, IM or carrier pigeon).  If there is enough interest I’m sure I can make it happen.