Today I head off to beautiful Stockholm, Sweden for the 2009 version of Cornerstone's Developer Summit.

I spoke at this conference last year and really loved it. Not just being in Stockholm (what a city!) but the conference was a lot of fun for me because I met a lot of new people who approach software development differently than I do. It was enlighteingin and I had a lot of fabulous conversations. Plus I had a tourist day before I went home which was not enough to see this big city. So I was eager to return.

This week I'll be teaching two sessions on the 2nd day of the conference and then a full day workshop on Friday. The focus of the workshop will be Entity Framework on the Web and I prepared some hands on labs. Even though the labs were for things I have done before, I was surprised at how much time it took to prepare them. (In itself a good lesson for me!)

A nice surprise this past year was learning that some old friends who I haven't seen since I attended their wedding 10 or more years ago, now live in Stockholm with their kids. So I will be spending my first day visiting with them. After the conference, I have another extra day which I plan to use exploring Stockholm and possibly environs (the Archipelago perhaps?) with Brian Loesgen who is also speaking at the conference. I haven't seen Brian since he started working for Microsoft. It will be fun to hear about his new life. :-) Scott Bellware will be there also doing some sessions as well as a workshop on Friday (which I would probably attend if I weren't teaching one myself). I haven't seen Scott in a while and am interested in hearing about his new view on Agile development and evolution towards Lean development. Should be a great week. If only it were a month later when it was truly springtime in Stockholm!