Ok, so I've been to quite a few VS Live's and I've seen the good and the bad, but here's my first impressions from VSLive 2007:
1st Keynote by Prashant Sridharan was good. Demo (by Sam G. (I think)) was clear and informative...
Nima Dilmaghani has some really interesting things to say, but his presentation quality--Well I've already blogged about that....
Lunch - Ok, they've gone away from the cold box lunch of past years; good. But they need a major lesson in crowd control. The lines were way, way too long.
Partners - Hello, anyone there? There's fewer booths than I've ever seen at a VSLive. They need way more, quadruple would be a start.... I've never been to a conference with this few partner booths.
The "Hands-On Center".... Uh. ok. It's a bunch of machines with XP and IE6.0.... No dev tools, no Vista, not even IE 7.0.... Ok, so I can check my email, but at a developers conference you'd think a "Hands-On Center" would allow you to play with the tools you're hearing about in the conference. Seriously sucky.
The VIP Lounge, ok nice yeah, a couple of widescreens running XBox-360's, and movies. The snack area is out of drinks, and the "private computer lab" seems to be two of the "Hands-On Center" pc's stuck in a corner.... Hmmmm.
Gotta go, my feet hurt. Yeah, no chairs in the "Hands-On Center" either.
-Andy
Ok, so Nima Dilmaghani needs to work on his presentation skills...
Nima gave two talks today at VS Live about Vista development--a subject I was quite interested in. But man, watching his presentations (both of them!) was just painful. It appeared he had done no preparation, and he was unfamiliar with Vista, Powerpoint, and Visual Studio. Now the guy might be a genius, he might really know his stuff, but on stage you had to be sorry for the guy. Really Microsoft, give someone else the presentation duties. Spare us Nima ever again.
Unfortunately I really wanted to know what he was trying to convey. I can only hope the slides and demos from his talk will be published later.... (although I doubt it, more on that later....)
In contrast, Scott Stanfield from Vertigo Software did a last minute demo of some new WPF demos his company has been working on. As he described it, he was asked to do the presentation only about an hour beforehand, but his talk was smooth and polished. The demo was very cool, and everything was really put together.
Such a contrast...
-Andy
If you see me, stop by and say "Hi"...
-Andy