Drewby

We had our first Day of .NET in Columbus, Ohio this past Friday. It was a great success and a lot of fun! We had right around 100 attendees and the room was packed. Check out the pictures here.

I delivered my “Building Web Services” presentation. I decided to not use slides this time since our sessions were only about 50 minutes in length. The presentation goes through the concept of a SOAP envelope and shows how the protocols compose together by starting with a basic ASMX service and moving to WSE, adding addressing and security headers. The feedback on the evaluations was very positive - I was really pleased for my first presentation with no PPT deck.

We had two speakers not show due to the snow storm smacking the Midwest at the time. So, Alex Lowe and myself delivered two replacement sessions. Alex did one on Team System that he delivered earlier in the week and I polled the audience to pick a topic and prepared some content that morning.

The audience picked ASP.NET server controls as the topic, so I pulled together a quick demo and some talking points. My demo started with a server control that had every event in the excution lifecycle overriden so we could trace the lifecycle. I had the audience put the events in order first and then ran the debugger to have it stop at each event. I think they had fun with that. I had mixed results with the rest of the demo as I was having some brain freezes on how to handle post back events and post back data. Still, the feedback was pretty good.

As for logistics, I think we did pretty good for our first event. One big mistake we made was not having coffee and some snacks in the morning and afternoon. We ended up brewing as much coffee as we could using the normal office coffee maker, but we couldn't keep up. Another issue we had was controlling the temperature in the room (it was a little cold due to the weather outside), but there's only so much we could do there.

Many thanks to the other speakers who made it: Alex Lowe, Dave Donaldson, Ben Carey. And the speakers who tried there best to make it through the snow: James Avery, Steve Caravajal. Also, Dave and Alex for all the work they did to help organize the event. Thanks to Eric Maino for taking all the pictures and to Brian Prince for helping out with logistics during the day. And thanks to NuSoft Solutions for feeding all those mouths.