The hard part about going from one conference to the next is the lack of closure. Not that Oredev was bad and I need closure, but I would like to process it a little bit.

This was my third conference in Sweden in the past 2 years, but the first that was in the cool small city of Malmo. Malmo is just across the Oresund Strait from Copenhagen. I took the train from the Copenhagen airport to downtown Malmo and because the train goes under the famous bridge and then through a tunnel, I really had no idea what an amazing trip I was taking.

We stayed downtown right off the old square that is the center of Malmo. The first night there, the speakers were treated to a dinner hosted in Malmo’s beautiful old city hall where we were also greeted by town officials and given a history lesson which was pretty cool. The dinner began with a traditional soup that was a little startling to many but delicious.

Prior to dinner, Magnus Maartensen and his wife were generous enough to host a cocktail party in their apartment that was also in the historic square for the speakers in the .NET track. This was great since I got to see lots of friends (and as always, make some new ones).

Oredev is much bigger than many of the European conferences I have spoken at. To begin with there were 120 speakers, 14 tracks and I think about 1000 attendees. Fourteen tracks! And what I love is that this is much broader than a MS tech conference. .NET was just one of the 14 tracks. I met folks from the IPhone world, lots of Google employees, people who invent languages, people who invent software patterns.

I had breakfast with an IPhone speaker who said he wrote some IPhone apps for the company he works for. I checked his bio later. The company was AT&T and the guy has been on TED for god’s sake!

The meals during the conference were all served with sustainable plates and “silverware”. Plates were made of banana leaves. (We tried not to contemplate the carbon footprint of getting those to Sweden…) and the forks were wooden (?).

When I was first asked to submit talks to Oredev I was hesitant. I considered this a mecca for Agile and Domain Driven developers and thought I would get stoned because of my work with Entity Framework. But thanks to the big changes in EF4, I decided it would be the perfect venue to begin shifting my presentations to those about using EF in an agile way. So I accepted. Who knew what to expect?

Well, in addition to having a wonderful time doing my Agile Development with EF4 talk, something else really cool happened. I sat down with Oren Eini and
“helped” him create a version of his fabulous nHibernate and Linq to SQL profiler that would work with Entity Framework. Helped is in quotes because I mostly played the muse. Oren’s brain works much too fast for anyone  (well at least for me) to keep up with him. He’d show me an error message and as I was reading it, he would say “Oh I know!” and pull the laptop back in front of him and resume his mad coding. You can read more about EFProf on Oren’s blog.

Thanks to my new perspective on agile development, I’ve been getting more interested in MVC. It was cool to meet Trygve Reenskaug, the inventor of MVC. But I was also really happy to be able to spend some time talking with Scott Allen who has done a lot to help mere mortals understand ASP.NET MVC.

I returned from Oredev feeling the Agile love and getting more drawn into MVC as the way to develop well architected web applications. More to the point, now that I have my nice Repository pattern for EF, MVC makes it fun to plug it into! 🙂

And now,I’ve been home for two days, am just recovering from the jetlag, and head tomorrow to Las Vegas (3 hour time zone difference) for DevConnections. I love DevConnections which is why they are able to leave Vermont at a beautiful time of year to go to Vegas (which I don’t love).

I will be doing three talks – completely different than those I did at Oredev, but all on Entity Framework 4. I’ve already figured out which talk justifies showing off EFProf since I have the only build outside of Oren’s computer right on my laptop.

I have also told the organizers that if they find themselves with an empty slot, I’ll be happy to do my Agile EF4 talk.

I know I need a lot more links in this post but time to get back to prep for DevConnections!

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