Dave Donaldson

Day of .NET Recap

Monday, January 24 2005

Drew and Ben both beat me to it by posting first about the success of our first Day of .NET here in Columbus. I was going to post about it over the weekend, but I was just drained. With my current client, a couple major side projects, and preparing for the event, I did not get to bed before 2am any night last week, so I just kind of vegged out this weekend.

But I would like to echo Drew's take on the event and definitely thought it was a success. The area had a snow storm come through the night before, so we were worried about the dropoff in attendance. The registration capacity was 115 and we still had 100 people show up. That’s almost no dropoff even with the weather, which is really amazing. I think it says a lot about the developer community here in central Ohio, and I hope that it continues to get even stronger.

Also, as Drew mentioned, James and Steve couldn’t make it to give their talks because of the weather in Cincinnati (they got a ton more snow than we did), but Drew and Alex did an excellent job of filling in for them with other talks. Actually, I think all the talks went well. No major problems, technical difficulties, or demos not working.

I felt my presentation went pretty well (“Implementing a Service Gateway with COM Interop and Web Services”), although I didn’t get as many questions as I had hoped. I only had two slides and the rest was demo and code, so hopefully the attendees found it useful. I haven’t looked at all the feedback yet, so I guess I’ll find out more after Drew tabulates the data. My talk included architecture, design, and code, so I think it gave the crowd a nice mix. And I’ve already thought of how to make the talk better next time around as I want to get the audience a little more involved. Of course, if anyone was there and has a suggestion, let me know.

For those of you that didn’t get in to the event: don’t worry, there will be another Day of .NET next month with the same sessions and speakers. Hopefully the weather cooperates and James and Steve can make it up. With those two and their talks, the event is sure to be even better than this one. We’re also having discussions about holding these events every quarter, so keep an eye on the blog and the event site for future details.

Lastly, I’d also like to thank Drew, Ben, Alex for their excellent talks and being a part of the day, Steve and James for trying to be there (next time guys), Eric Maino for traveling down from Michigan and snapping the pics, and Microsoft and NuSoft for their sponsorship. And one last thing: thanks to Brian Prince for learning how to make coffee for the first time in his life in order to satisfy the 100 coffee-craving attendees :-)