When I arrived at WCC this morning, I met up with my friends Mike H. and Dean C.

After a quick run through registration to grab our name tags, t-shirts and some swag, we headed to our first session of the day – Architecting the User Experience presented by Josh Holmes.  I always enjoy watching Josh speak and today was no different.  His talk really made me wish my project wasn’t so far along because I’d love to incorporate some of the things I saw during his presentation.  Oh well, maybe the next project.

For the second session, the three of us split up.  I stayed in room 275 (which BTW, sucked as far as comfort goes) and sat through Dustin Campbell’s ‘Hardcore Reflection’.  OMG, ummm…..yea.  It was a very cool talk, but damn….he was right when he titled it ‘hardcore’.  He definitely knows his stuff inside and out.

Mike, Dean and I (btw, neither of them blog, so they suck) had lunch together.  At one point, Jason stopped by our table and we talked WoW for a few minutes (Mike and I gave him a hard time about unnatural love for PVE).   After lunch, the three of us headed up to room 210 so Mike could setup and prepare for his IIS 7 talk.  Mike has given this talk before, but it’s normally a 3+ hour discussion that he had to cram into 65 minutes.

Dean and I abandonded him to sit through Mark Miller’s intro to WPF and Expression Blend.  Mark is always entertaining, especially with Dustin heckling him from the audience.  This is the 3rd or 4th time I’ve seen WPF demoed and it continues to be something I want to dive in to.  Of course, this holds true for all of the W* technologies — WPF, WCF, WF.

Mark’s first demo didn’t work as he expected, so going with the flow, he announced very loudly:

I SUCK, I SUCK, I SUCK

I was surprised to see all of the presenters running Vista.  I still can’t bring myself to install it.  Maybe when this project wraps up I’ll find the time.

Expression Blend looks very cool.  Mark continued to have issues with the demos, but he definitely had fun with the situation.

The three of us got back together for Marks’ second session about WPF/WCF.  The demo Mark came up with was very cool – an air hockey game.  The only problem I had with this session (at the least the very beginning) is that Mark went through the code before showing the demo which made it tough to get into.  Once he showed the actual game running, things made a lot more sense.

The final session we all decided to sit in was Keith Elder’s talk on Smart Clients.  This was the first time I’ve seen Keith speak and I’m glad I decided to go (even if he did break the projector).    It was a very interesting talk and it truly does make me miss doing WinForms development.  Hopefully I can get back to it soon.  Of course, watching his presentation also made me wish I could turn back the clock on my current project, but oh well, not much I can do about it now.  The only complaint I had about this session was NOT related to the content or Keith’s delivery, but environmental conditions.  The room was WAY TOO FREAKIN’ HOT!

Overall, this years Day of .NET was awesome!  BTW, I absolutely LOVED the way they did the book raffle!  Instead of all of us standing in a room waiting for our numbers to be called, they pre-drew the numers and posted them in the hall leading to room 275 (where the main raffle took place).  All we had to do was look for the last 3 digits from our tickets.  If they were posted, we got a book from that table.  Soooooo much better than the “old way”.    I’m hoping upcoming events follow this method.

So, to wrap-up, it was good to see Mike, Dean, Dan, Joe and Jason again.  I also saw Vinay (a former co-worker) and John (a former student).

If you’ve never been to an event like this, find the time to do it!