SDN Conference Day 2
Today I woke up at the crack of dawn because I had an 8:30 AM session. Okay maybe not quite the crack, but for me it was early. Especially after a night of socializing. That's a really cool thing about conferences here, the attendees love to go out with you after dinner and uh.. socialize. ;-) There were a lot of great conversations about technology flying everywhere it was hard to keep up. I crashed about 1 AM (which everyone told me was early!) and woke up about an hour and a half before my talk, no problem.
This talk I've done many times before and it's one of my most favorite subjects -- XML Literals and LINQ to XML in Visual Basic. I've done variations of this talk at user groups, other conferences and webcasts. And I showed a lot of the techniques that I've written about here as well as this article and this one. This was my best session according to the ratings but it's so easy to do well with this talk because of the simple and powerful expressiveness of XML in VB. It doesn't take much code at all to start creating, querying and manipulating XML documents directly in the editor with this awesome feature. Check out the VB Team blog where Doug Rothaus is doing a series of posts on XML in VB.
I also attended Brian Noyes' session on WPF Data Binding. Since I've been speaking about this as well I thought I'd join him and compare notes. ;-). I also told him about what scenarios I was going to tackle next on my WPF Forms over Data video series and he validated where I was going with it. It's great to chat with experts building business applications because I've built many in my life as well and the challenges are always similar. Brian is one of my data binding heroes since he wrote his Data Binding in Windows Forms 2.0 (which I still highly recommend).
Although there were a ton of .NET sessions, there were also a lot of Delphi sessions as well as a co-conference DotNetNuke OpenForce at this venue. I met a lot of cool people in the software industry.
The final wrap up was a bunch of cool give-aways for the attendees including a Wii and a Blue-Ray disk player -- very cool! I took a few pictures of some of the speakers and organizers...some of them acting pretty goofy.
Tomorrow I head back to Amsterdam where the organizers are going to take the speakers on a Holland tour. I can't wait!
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About Beth Massi
Beth is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Community Team at Microsoft and is responsible for producing and managing content for business application developers, driving community features and team participation onto MSDN Developer Centers (http://msdn.com), and helping make Visual Studio one of the best developer tools in the world. She also produces regular content on her blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/bethmassi), Channel 9, and a variety of other developer sites and magazines. As a community champion and a long-time member of the Microsoft developer community she also helps with the San Francisco East Bay .NET user group and is a frequent speaker at various software development events. Before Microsoft, she was a Senior Architect at a health care software product company and a Microsoft Solutions Architect MVP. Over the last decade she has worked on distributed applications and frameworks, web and Windows-based applications using Microsoft development tools in a variety of businesses. She loves teaching, hiking, mountain biking, and driving really fast.
