The Burlington .NET developers had a great treat this week. On Monday night we had Chris Bowen, Bob Familiar and Jim O'Neil, our Dev Evangelists from the Microsoft Waltham office leading a Q&A at the Vermont.NET User Group. We talked about everything from running .NET on Linux or even Unix, to Windows 7 to the age old "is VB going away?" question. It was also a nice opportunity for the members and Chris, Bob & Jim to connect one-on-one. Our meetings have been held lately at GE Healthcare (formerly known as IDX) in South Burlington. And a funny side note is that years ago, Chris worked there - not just IDX but in the South Burlington office.
Then yesterday was the Burlington edition of the Northeast MSDN Roadshow where Chris, Bob and Jim presented all day (from 8:30 - 3:30) on a variety of great topics. I had to duck out for a few hours and therefore missed some of it. Each topic was valuable and their collective experience lends itself to the broad coverage throughout the day. I especially appreciated Chris' talk in the morning on .NET Developer Practices where he talked about taking advantage of tools in VSTS Developer even if you aren't developing on a team and using TFS as well as some of the tools like unit testing, that have been moved into the VS Pro edition. Bob is an architect, so offered a great perspective on Azure. I missed Jim's SQL 2008 for Developers talk, Chris' lunchtime XNA presentation and caught the end of Chris' F# intro talk. At the end of the day, Jim presented a slew of debugging tips & tricks. Some that I have never used. I know I have seen them over the years, but hadn't picked them up. It was also nice to discover that I'm not the only person who has the capacity to learn only about 1 new keyboard shortcut per year!
Thanks guys for coming to Burlington! We hope to see you back soon.
I especially appreciated their handout that not only had the day's agenda, but their contact info and a slew of learning resources (including links for the VTdotNET and VTSQL user groups.
