On January 22nd, I attended the MDC in Detroit.  Since I didn’t feel like braving the Detroit-area traffic Thursday morning, and since I made plans to room with Alan, I drove up the night before.  After picking Alan up at the airport at 6, we headed for the RenCen.

While Alan was off doing “speaker” things, I caught up with Corey and then recorded almost an hour of video for his “How did you get started in programming” video series.   I love how my simple blog post inspired Corey to take it one step further.  I definitely expanded on my story in that 45+ minute interview.  I had a great time doing it, so hopefully I don’t bore everyone to tears.

After the interview with Corey, we caught back up with a bunch of the speakers and talked for a while about a wide range of subjects.  By the time we were done talking, it was almost midnight, so Alan and I headed up to our room and crashed. 

Before I knew it, it was 6am and my alarm was going off.  Since Alan had some pre-event stuff to do, he was up, showered and dressed pretty damn quick.  I on the other hand, managed to snag another 30 minutes of sleep.

Thankfully, I left my laptop in the room because with no wi-fi at the event, there was no point in hauling it around.  I registered pretty quickly, then caught up with Josh and some other friends.  I originally planned on skipping the keynote because, well, because most keynotes suck.   I’m not sure why, but I decided to stick this one out.  I think 90 minutes is a long time for a keynote, but Ron Jacobs did a good job of giving us the 50k foot view of all the technologies the day would cover.

I ended up hanging out a lot of the day, catching up with friends that came in from Ohio and western Michigan.  The sessions I did try to catch were packed.  I’m not sure what was up with the tiny-ass break-out rooms, but there was standing room only in the sessions I checked out.  Alan was leading the Community Courtyard, so I sat in a few great conversations, almost exclusively focused on the technologies being presented in the breakout sessions.

After the event, a bunch of us went out for pizza (thanks Microsoft for picking up the tab!), hung out and talked (well, tried to talk since it was pretty freakin’ loud).  After pizza, a few brave souls headed to a casino, while the rest of us walked back to the hotel.  My plan was leave around 9 so I’d be home before midnight.  Yea, right.  I ended up getting caught up in a great conversation with Brian, Bender and Chris and didn’t leave until around 10:15. 

While Chris and I drove separately, we were heading in the same direction so we decided to stick close on the drive back.  Of course, it took about 30 minutes for Chris to find his car in the parking garage and then we made a wrong turn based on bad directions given to us by a parking attendant.  We finally got on the road around 11pm.  We decided to take US-12 since it was the most direct route home.  The heavy fog we ran into during the first part of our trip was unexpected, but overall, the trip back wasn’t bad.

When all was said and done, I came away from this event pretty fired up about Windows 7 and MEF.  I actually tried installing Windows 7 on my laptop, but due to some driver-related issues, I bailed and reinstalled Vista.  The features I was really anxious to use were mounting VHDs as drives, booting to VHDs and the decreased resource usage / increased performance.  Hopefully when Windows 7 is fully-baked, I won’t have as many issues.

As for MEF, I’m not sure I’m as fired up today as I was leaving the event.  Again, it comes down to it being an “in-progress, almost-there, kinda sorta” offering that I’m not comfortable using in a production application.  Maybe I’ll re-visit it when .NET 4.0 comes out, but for now, as with Windows 7, I’ll survive without it.