West Michigan Day of .NET '08

posted on 05/12/08 at 12:40:12 am by Joel Ross

On Saturday, I attended the West Michigan Day of .NET event, and had a great time - for the little bit I could actually be there. Unfortunately, I had to leave around lunch time, so I couldn't stick around as long as I would have liked.

Anyway, I arrived there early so I could be sure I was prepared for my presentation - I was second on the schedule. First, I grabbed breakfast, said hi to Jeff Tucker, Matt Davis and Seth Longcore (none of which have blogs - yet!), and headed to the speaker's lounge where I met Jay Wren and Dan Rigsby. I ended up skipping out on the first session so I could get in one last dry run before I was to go on. That didn't happen, since Mike Eaton, Dan Hounshell and Dave Redding walked in. Later, The Quick Solutions guys came in - Steven Harman, Tim Wingfield and James Bender. So yeah, no prep, but it was great meeting a bunch of people that I've interacted with online over the past 6 months (mostly via Twitter, the new conference back channel).

Chris Woodruff, who helped organized the event, introduced me to Patrick Foley (that's his twitter link. His blog seems pretty quiet). Despite being a Dallas Stars fan, he's a pretty decent guy and, as it turns out, has been working with a co-worker of mine on another project! Someplace in there (it's a blur), I met Jeff McWherter as well.

By then, it was time to head off to my session. I was up after Joe Wirtley, so I got a chance to say hi to him as he was unhooking his computer and I was hooking up mine. I had a slight technical issue getting the right resolution on the projector, but luckily I was able to work around it before I started. The session went fairly well. I would guess I had about 20-25 people in the session and had quite a few good questions. I was up against Josh Holmes and his building rich Internet applications session, which was disappointing, since I wanted to see that one!

After I finished up in my room, I headed over to Mike Eaton's Silverlight session to show support (read: tweet one liners from the back of the room). The room was packed, and only after I found a spot did I realize I was sitting next to Chris Broland, someone I've been following on twitter for a while. And when I say I realized who it was, I mean he told me who he was! Mike's session was pretty good - good content and good style. I've got a few pointers for him, but overall, he did a great job (especially considering he was partying all night before the event!).

After that, I pretty much had to leave. But not before I caught up with Dean Weber (no blog, Dean?) and had a nice conversation with him. After that, I headed back to the speaker's lounge to pack up. There were lots of tweeps in there that I hadn't yet met, but didn't have the time to do much more than pack up, so I missed a chance to introduce myself and say hi, which was a bit disappointing.

On the way out to the car, Wally McClure was grabbing something from his car, so I said hi, and I got a chance to meet him. We had a good conversation. Wally has a very distinct voice, which I'd become accustomed to through his podcast. I think I spent most of the short conversation thinking about how nice it was to put an actual person to the voice that I've heard on his podcast for a while now.

Then I got in my car and headed off. It was a great event, and I'm sure there's someone that I met that I didn't mention here, and if that's so, it's not on purpose. It was a whirlwind morning for me, and it's late after a very, very busy weekend!

Categories: Personal