I made my way over to Gamefest was this week, a conference geared to game industry professionals (developers/testers/marketers). I was rather hoping that my manager would agree to cover it as a training expense, but that was a no-go. Fortunately, I was hooked up with a Microsoft discount code by a fellow employee.

What an amazing event. The catering was fantastic. The party on Monday was great (complete with a Segway slalom course). But the true excellence was the content of the conference itself. Sessions covered designing multi-core applications, managed code performance tricks, Direct3D 10 analysis, XNA (wow!), and over a hundred more distinct talks.

One of the best sessions for me was Taming the CLR: How to Write Really Fast Managed Code by Rico Mariani. I understand he has covered a lot of what he presented in his blog, and can't wait to check it out. I also found out he's in the same building as I am... I plan to chat with him about the talk when he gets back from vacation.