What a refreshing experience.  Don’t get me wrong – I love TechEd.  I love the PDC.  There are enormous amounts of information presented at these large-style conferences.  …and the information is pretty much delivered in a monologue.  The audiences are just too large for a dialog.

I get to hang out and brainsuck at the Applied XML DevCon this week, and I’m having a blast.  Tim Bray already blistered one of the folks on my team for something he said on his blog.  Matt was able to respond.  It’s a dialog full of opinions, best practices, etc.  Tim Ewald calls this type of event “boutique events”.  I forgot how much I love these gatherings.  There’s two folks in front of me – one who fired up Whidbey to create a web service.  The other guy is walking thru some XSD code.

Time to get back to the talk….