There were four of us heading down to DDD on friday, the geeking started pretty much straight away, derek and mike spent over an hour in the back of the car creating an ad-hoc wifi network between my SPV and a tablet pc, so that they could RDP from the PDA to the PC and open the CE webserver page in IE. I know what you're thinking, that's so cool! After a few late drinks in the bar it was bed in the tiny single rooms, you'd think they were designed especially for tech conference delegates except for the serious shortage of power sockets. The very first session I went to was probably the most practical. I was aware of msbuild before and knew that VS2005 used it, but now I've seen a bit more of what you can do with it I reckon I can double our companies productivity by the end of the week ;) On Friday afternoon I had a certain desire to stick my name on the list for the grok talks, (looking at that list now I notice a few people chickened out!). I figured since it was just a 10 min thing they wouldn't expect much, I had no slides, no code samples, not even a screen shot, and I was doing a talk on image manipulation :-s The first guy had slides, the second guy had a whole routine where he was talking to a video of himself, and the next guy did a pretty funny written on cards thing ala Bob Dylan. Then it was my turn... and somehow I won best talk! The prize was an MSDN licence worth about £1500! I was a bit surprised, I'm not gonna try the total improv approach again though! Correction: As Colin just pointed out, no one chickened out, it was down to time constraints, so sorry if I upset anyone! I really wouldn't blame any new speakers for changing their minds though, it was the largest audience I've spoken infront of since at least the school play.

Labels: conference, DDD4, developer day, microsoft, msbuild

I'm heading down to reading tonight for DDD, this is the first one I've been to. I've got a rough idea of what I'm going to see for each session but there are few I can't decide on! There are 3 other guys from my company going down so between us we can go see everything then just compare notes after. I'll be going to see Sarahs web2 session, I'm sure she'll have a few good insights, plus it'll be a nice break from all the dreary architecture stuff (joke, I love it really!). I put my name down for a grok talk, I think I can talk for a few minutes about GDI+ before I run out of thoughts, I'm not really sure what'll be expected of me though or how many will turn up to listen. If you want to meet up then let me know, or if you see me about then say hi!

Labels: DDD4, developer day, microsoft, reading