Well, Deeper in .NET 2005 has come and gone now. Friday night blurred into Saturday, which blurred into Sunday. It was finally Tuesday when I started feeling rested. It was an awesome day, though. The speakers were great. The crowd had good questions. The box lunch was… ummm, the speakers were great!
In my last post, I mentioned all of the speakers that were coming and a few of their topics. I really enjoyed them all, and I learned a lot too. At lunch, there was an open forum to ask pretty much any question to the panel of experts, which included four of the speakers (all except for Rocky who had to leave) and Tom Lindley (sp?). Scott Guthrie was in a rush to catch a plane, so the moderator asked for all of the questions about ASP.NET 2.0 to be asked first so he would have a chance to answer them before taking off mid-session.
Well, I had recently found out that he was now in charge of the IIS team and that a new version was in the works. After a series of questions on ASP.NET with fairly short answers from ScottGu, I asked (paraphrased), “I know you’re about to leave, but in about 1 minute, what is the coolest feature of IIS 7?” Well, I may have made him miss his plane! He seemed very excited to talk about it and listed several (5 or 6?) pretty cool features, and talked about it for probably 5 minutes!
Sorry, ScottGu, if you missed your flight! Needless to say, it excited me about the product to see his excitement.
After the event, the Executive Committee of the WI .NET Users Group, any remaining Platinum sponsors, and any remaining speakers (who didn’t have flights to catch) all went to a nice steak dinner at the hotel restaurant. I actually got to know some of the EC members a little better, and they’re not so bad after all. 😉 I even got to finally meet Doug, Dan and Mark from the Chippewa Valley .NET Users Group.
All in all the whole day was pretty awesome and I can’t wait for next year’s event! We just need to come up with a name for it. The first was Day of .NET, then Deep in .NET, and now Deeper in .NET. Let me know if you have any suggestions for next year.
Now, aside from all of the event stuff happening, I had a little more going on. I am a partner in Oochie Web Hosting, which was a Gold sponsor of the event (as well as being the hosting provider of the WI .NET Users Group). Dennis, one of the other Oochie partners, was there manning the booth, but he wasn’t alone all day.
I need to give a very special thanks to my wife, Kelly, for showing up and helping Dennis get through the day. She kept Dennis company and even answered questions when it was busy, which is pretty impressive given that she’s not really a technical person. Plus, she went and got lunch for me and Dennis at some chicken place nearby (which explains why the box lunch seemed less than wonderful).
All in all, we (Oochie) collected around 100 business cards of people interested enough to leave a card with us. Since we didn’t have any little gimmicky things at our booth to give away like many vendor booths do, we were more than impressed with the turnout. We were, though, giving away a free year of hosting, as well as some other discounted services.
Anyway, yesterday, Kelly took all those cards and entered them into an Excel spreadsheet for us. Plus she did all this for free — that is, free plus a new pair of shoes… 🙂
I’m not really sure what we’re going to do with all those names yet. Maybe we’ll sell them… j/k I imagine we’ll just do a one-or-two-time mailing to find out who is interested, so if you’re name is in there, don’t worry, you won’t get SPAM blasted.
Anyway, I thought the day was great, and so did a few others. Here are a few blog entries I’ve seen about the day after the fact:
I’m really looking forward to next year! (I think I alrady said that though…)