Another good conference at an end

So, here I am sitting at the speakers lounge at DevConnections at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas after another great conference. It is amazing the level American conferences keep. The speakers are great, the conferences are well organized and everything just flows. And it is pretty cool to be able to share the speakers lounge with people like John Papa, Dan Wahlin, Paul Litvin, Juval Löwy and Scott Hanselman. It is also very humbling. These presenters are really the cream of the crop, and I am still kind of wondering what I did here. But I got to do it, and had a lot of fun, so I won’t complain.

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Keynote with Scott Scott Scott

Ok, so tonight's keynote with Scott Hanselman was interesting to say the least. Hanselman is always fun to listen to, and I would consider him a pretty brilliant presenter. Today, while waiting for his keynote to start, he showed a bunch of interesting things on the projectors. As I sat down, he had legacy machines booting, or at least showed the boot sequence of old Mac OSs, Amiga, Commodore and Windows. Quite funny…and after that, he just browsed around the web showing off a bunch of really funny websites. Sites like http://sometimesredsometimesblue.com/ and http://isitchristmas.com/. He also showed off a video with Steve Ballmer singing, an org-chart of Microsoft with each unit pointing guns at the other. And yes, he also covered in depth his relationship to Scott Gu… And the some!

And however ridiculously funny it was to hear him talk, and hear him joke at the expense of Microsoft and boost a few open source projects, it was not the main attraction. The main attraction was when he found a missing feature in ASP.NET MVC, said that he wanted it fixed but that they were too busy. So he open sourced ASP.NET and asked one of the Mono guys to fix it by getting it off Codeplex using Git… Very funky!

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DevConnections Keynote w Jason Zander

I just attended an interesting keynote with Jason Zander. It didn’t really include a lot of new stuff as it was mostly focused around VS11, but it did bring up some things I hadn’t seen before, and I must say it is looking good.

It seems like the ALM stuff is taking another step in the right direction, adding in a lot of cool feedback stuff. Unfortunately, with the people I meet in the industry, it won’t be used as widely as it should. Everyone seems to have their reasons for not using TFS, but I keep coming back to the same point. If you look at the individual pieces of the TFS, like for example the source control, you will find better solutions out there. But if you start looking at the whole offering, you will see that it all integrates nicely giving you a very powerful suite of tools. I just wish I had more time to play with it and see what it can do…

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