*** This is gonna be a long one so bare with me ***
As I sit in my hotel room watching "Deadliest Catch" (I love that show), pondering all that I have seen over the last few days, I wonder what was the most memorible part for me. There has been so many great things that have been annouced, shown, and / or discussed. I have had the opportunity to meet so many interesting people it is unreal. Most people that know me, know that I am an freak about reading blogs. I even go so far as to require that the developers I work with read blogs daily. This leads me into "The Lunch"
The Lunch
Well today I had lunch with 5 of the most interesting people that I have ever met. The lunch crew consisted of Jeff Attwood of Coding Horror, Phil Haack of SubText and Haacked.com, Jon Galloway of Jon Galloway.ToString() blog fame, Miguel De Icaza of Mono, Dave Nielson of StrikeIron, and Rob Conery of Commerce Starter Kit and SubSonic (huge fan of this). The conversation ranged from whether or not I read Phils blog ( and I do, it was on my feeds so get off my back, j/k) to the Miguel De Icaza challenge 2007. Gathered at that table were some brightest minds in the Open Source and .NET communities. I mean I am sitting at a freaking table with Miguel De Icaza, Phil Haack, and Rob Conry. Holy cow!! These guys are legends within the .NET community as well as BIG proponents of Open Source. It truly was an honor to be included in this circle, thank you Dave for the invite and insisting aI talk with Rob. I owe you one.
Silverlight, Silverlight, Silverlight?
By now I am sure you have read many blogs about Silverlight, well let me tell you, this is going to be a very hot item going forward. My mind is already racing to find exactly where I will use this in CrystalTech's control center and web site. I can already see huge benefits to this. The cross platform remoting debugging is amazing. I think as developers we have been waiting for this for quite some time. I will not touch on this anymore as I am sure there is already a multitude of fresh blog posts on this.
Orcas Beta 1
C'mon Microsoft, I cannot wait anymore for the finished product on this. It really is going to be a great product. The targeted framework functionality, melding with silverlight / expression, and Javascript Debugging. Can you say Wow!
Fellow DotNetNuker's
Tomorrow I am having lunch with Antonio Chagoury, Philip Beadle (hopefully), and hopefully Jim Bonnie. I met Jim today while in the lunch line. Very wierd being called out by name, it caught me offgaurd, but in a good way. It will be nice to put faces and vioces to the names. I missed the mash-up Monday night, and apparently I missed out big time. Not again I say.
My Top Moments
- Meeting Rob Conery and Jon Galloway
- Meeting Antonio Chagaury - fellow DNN'er. We clicked from the moment we met.
- Flying over with Scott Cate
- Defending DNN in the Windows Web hosting talk (whole 'nother blog post - it is on video and audio)
- Silverlight
- Open Source panel discussion
- Key note
I will revise this list tomorrow when I get home and after I meet the fellow DNN'rs as that will be a highlight for me.
Well it is time for me to hit the sack. Tomorrow is a long day and I still have a tone of emails to fire off.
Alec