MSDN Developer Conference – WOW!

Recovering this morning from an amazing day at the DC MSDN Developer Conference in Reston, VA. I had a blast helping out with the keynote, presenting on Azure, and seeing and hanging out with so many folks from the Mid-Atlantic developer community. Also finally got a chance to put some faces with names from online and twitter, including Alvin Ashcraft and Doug White, not to mention Rachel Appel (who got raves for her session on the roadmap for ASP.NET 4.0). It’s events like this that remind me just how incredibly fortunate I am to work with such great people, both inside and outside Microsoft.

I do owe a couple of mea culpas, which I want to take care of:

1. During my logistics portion of the keynote, I highlighted some upcoming community events, and (as tweeted by @antoniochagoury who leads C-DUG) I managed to miss the upcoming Capital Area DotNetNuke User Group’s meeting next week. They’re having Joe Brinkman come in and present on jQuery and DNN. Not to be missed.
2. I got a heads-up from @csharpfritz on twitter that I goofed in my Azure session (which also used MVC) by hard-coding a path in my view instead of using Url.Action. My bad…still relatively new to the MVC style. I’ve updated my demo to use Url.Action in the future…thanks for the heads-up!

I was definitely beat by the end of the day (14 hours in), but I can’t remember the last time I had that much fun at a one-day event. Thanks to all of the speakers who came out to share their knowledge of new and existing technologies. Thanks to my DE peer, Dani Diaz, who was the city lead for the DC event, and did a ton of work in helping organize and pull the whole thing off.

If you didn’t make it to the DC event, you may not be too late…there are two more MSDN DevCon events coming up on the east coast, two in the heartland, and one on the west coast. Here’s the list:

1/20/09
New York, NY

1/22/09
Boston, MA

1/22/09
Detroit, MI

1/26/09
Dallas, TX

2/23/09
San Francisco, CA

There’s learning to be had, prizes to be won, networking to be done. And it’s only $99 to register. I’ll leave you with my favorite quote about the DC event on twitter yesterday:

I've been awake for over 14 hours. #MDCDC is totally worth it though

There’s probably something I’ve forgotten, so remind me in the comments if there’s anything/anyone important I’ve missed.