I’ll be doing some more in-depth stuff later in the week here on the blog, but I just had a few things I want to get down from the last three days.

Some of the attendees here kill me with their attitudes and comments…just some of the things you hear in sessions or walking around are priceless.  A few of note:

Pre-conference workshop, Rocky is giving a *great* talk on business objects.  Now it’s about “distributed objects” and scaleable systems, but it’s an all day class and there’s a lot of groundwork to lay down.  So this guy pipes up and asks “hey, are you going to ever get to the distributed part of this thing, since it’s a distributed object thing”.  And basically the guy heckles Rocky.  Now of course, Rocky heckles the guy back the rest of the day, in his own, non-offensive Rocky way, and hilarity ensured.  But seriously…

So then today I’m walking toward the passport lounge, and there’s two guys standing there talking.  Guy one says to guy two “you know, I don’t know what the deal is with all this ‘smart client’ stuff…I mean, it’s just winforms” and guy two nods his head vigorously.  Genius.

There’s a lot of complaining about the food and stuff, and I’m down with that.  The box lunches are getting old…how many roast beef sandwiches can you eat in a week.  There’s no breakfast to speak of.  The coffee, while good, is only out and available for like some random 10 minute block in the morning, such that I didn’t get any this morning.  Drink selection throughout the day is lame…if you weren’t a passport holder you are SOL I think.  All in all the conference part of it is kinda lame.  There’s like 7 total vendors, no swag, the AppDev party was lame (free 64MB USB Key not withstanding).

HOWEVER.  The content thus far is outstanding.  I’ve been in some great classes so far, Sam Gentile, Mark Miller, Cathi Gero, Rocky, Ron Jacobs just to name a few.  Awesome stuff on smart client, reporting services, Cathi did a great ClickOnce thing, all in all it’s been great learning.  So today, as I’m walking into the lunch thing, there’s a group of guys behind me complaining “as much as we paid they should be feeding us better than blah blah blah blah blah paid this much blah blah blah money blah blah”.  So finall, sick of hearing it, I turn around and say “don’t you really think you’re paying for the value of the content?”.  The most vocal complainer starts backpedaling and stammering “well yeah, but…yeah…”.  Another guy kinda laughs and says “yeah, but we are paying them a lot of money”.  Me: “Yeah, but none of us are really paying it are we”.  Oh yeah.  People forget as they leave classes early to get a shot at the AppDev t-shirt that their companies are paying them to be here to learn.  It sounds kinda ghey I know, but it’s the truth.  And if you want your career to excel then you have to take these things fairly seriously.  At least the learning part.

Had a chance to have a couple of drinks and dinner with Scott Allen last night, totally cool guy.  Got to chat a bit about general BS, working in healthcare, business travel, and just chill a little, so that was cool.  Still have not made my mind up as to whether or not I’m going to catch his debugging class in an hour…RHS is doing a pretty interesting looking generics class at the same time.  So we’ll see.

Okay, well that’s it for now, couple more classes today, then a day-long Team System thing tomorrow, and then it’s back home.