Well – what a day. We had a HUGE attendance (neck and neck with Seattle I think) 600+. There was great energy. All of the speakers were totally ON today and had a great time. The attendees were great. I got to hop on stage during the keynote and talk about the koolaid at the PDC. Actually, Carl asked what was the best thing. I said seeing long lines in front of the men’s room and none at the ladies! ha ha. Then of course I oohed and aahed about WinFS, Avalon and Indigo. How easy Indigo will be for people who want to leverage it but not get under the hood (WSE2 will be able to give you a taste of that) and the coolness factor of all of those FAKE computer programs on CSI coming to real life in Longhorn.
There were a LOT of people in the web track. I loved doing my talk. I wish I could spend a whole day on that so that I can feel like I really was able to teach people the real details. It’s frustrating to have so much great content and not a lot of time. I will continue to blog about some things here.
I had a number of women tell me that it made them really happy to see a woman speaker at such a big event. (hip hip hooray) It’s still hard to explain – but to me it’s about not feeling like an alien when you go to these things.
The nicest surprise in Boston was discovering that Omar Shahine was there staying in the same hotel. So we hung out last night (I had had dinner with Carl Franklin and Rory Blyth and talked with Omar while he ate a yummy sushi dinner) then after today’s show, everyone bolted and I wanted to wait out the traffic and storm before heading north to Nashua, so I tracked Omar down and we had dinner. It was fun learning about his background and how he came to Microsoft by way of Apple and is, as they all seem to be, very passionate about Microsoft as an incredible place to work.
Speaking of Rory – I did not see his smart client talk (same time as mine) however he was SO funny and fun when demoing C# generics during the closing keynote. Carl and Pat Hynds are just the funniest team when doing the keynotes.
The only bad part was the nasty snowstorm at the end of the day. I whiteknuckled it all the way to Nashua only to find when I arrived a tthe hotel that all of the Leszynski people who are running the TabletPC workshop tomorrow were stuck in Denver. So the event had to be cancelled (the weather here is enough to justify that anyway) Bummer. I was going to show off the corporate application that I have been working on for tablets! But I have a nice hotel room and will swing by a client’s office tomorrow on the way back to Vermont.
A special thanks also to all of the folks who handled the DevDays event in Boston!!!
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