Yesterday was the St. Louis Day of .NET event (hencefore I'll refer to STLDODN); it was a great success!.
I was fortunate enough to be involved in this grand event; Clint Edmonson asked if I would be available to present some Microsoft PDC material, and I took that opportunity - even got to choose which topic to present. I chose to do a presentation on Parallel Programming for Managed Code Developers. Thanks for the chance, Clint.
To make sure I'm well prepared, I also volunteered to present it at Kansas City Day of .NET last week. I blogged about it and also provided my presentation materials/samples in that post. I did not change my presentation materials, so slides & samples (both for VS2010 CTP and Parallel Extensions June CTP versions) are available in this post. These materials will also be made available at the STLDODN website later on (after the people have some rest 
).
In any case, it was an awesome day; some 200+ attendees came, presentations split into 6 tracks / rooms - got to meet some of my peers & friends there as well. This event would not have happened without the heroic efforts of the 3 main organizers: Jeff Fattic, Kevin Grossnicklaus and Scott Spradlin - kudos and my hats off to them in organizing all this into fruition. Quite a bit of sponsors donated to this cause; and fun was had for everyone.
For those that may have attended my presentation, can I get some feedback on the presentation? I'm not sure what's the best way to do this yet; I guess commenting on this post (or the KC post) would be fine for the moment. I'm always on the lookout as to what improvements that I can make to my presentation (slides / samples / materials) & my presentation skills so I can continue to be a better presenter. I'm very new at this, and I am trying to make sure I learn as much as possible within the shortest amount of time - it's a long road to become a good presenter, so I need to run as fast as I can.
I got to attend other sessions that are presented; I thought the Developing Multi-Touch Applications session by Brian Blanchard was awesome. He brought in an HP SmartTouch PC, which is a PC + Touch Screen combined, but the touch screen can recognize 2 touch areas (imagine like it can handle 2 mouse / 2 click events), and showed some cool stuff on utilizing the 2 touch areas to manipulate stuff - it's no Microsoft Surface, but to see something in action in front of me was great!
Eric Brown provided Open Source Solutions to Application Lifecyle Management, back-to-back with a session about VSTS 2010, attendees could contrast the two approaches - it was interesting indeed. Chris Deweese did a session about Oslo, and man Microsoft didn't make it easy on him; the tools and packages he had to work with was very, very early in development - he did his best though and focuses on how some development challenges can be solved using a Model-Driven development.
At the end of yesterday, I was beat; unbelievably beat. I think I was also very nervous the day before the event, thus earning me only 3 hours of sleep going into the event. I slept like 14 hours before I woke up today; can't say that I'm fully refreshed yet, but I felt soooo much better at the moment . Regardless, cheers to everyone I got to see at the event, and let this first STLDODN become a sign of bigger things to come.