michael eaton

I'm a few days late getting this posted, but sometimes other things in life take precendence.

So, my friend Mike and I arrived at the event around 7am.  Luckily we got to check-in early.  The company he works for, Sogeti, had a booth in the exhibitors area, so while he helped set things up, I checked out some of the other exhibitors.  After a quick walk around the room snagging some swag, I ran into some people I hadn't seen in awhile (Alex Lowe and a guy named Glen I used to work with at Sequoia).  Later in the morning, I hooked up with some friends that drove in from Lansing.

The keynote was good, although just a bit hard to follow once David White started going through VSTS.  I did enjoy his descriptions of project managers, dbas and developers.  This was my first real exposure to VSTS and it definitely looks cool.  Too bad I can't afford it. :-\  Once the keynote was done, I grabbed some more swag and talked with friends.

The next few sessions were pretty good, but by the time the final dev session of the day started, one of my friends and I resorted to playing hangman (R-rated) in the back of the room.

Lunch was ok, but like others have mentioned, there weren't enough tables, so I, like many others ended up sitting on the floor.

Overall, the experience was good.  I hooked up with friends, made some good business contacts and came away with some good “stuff”.  I haven't installed Visual Studio yet, mainly because I haven't had time.  Hopefully I'll get to it this weekend.

Other people that blogged about the Detroit event:
Alex Papadimoulis
Jim Holmes