Today I flew from Burlington to Detroit to Huntsville, Alabama to speak at the Huntsville VS.NET User Group. Lori McKinney was a wonderful host. Lori reads my blog and knows about my donut woes and actually bought me my very own doughnuts (for people who leave the state to go to work!) – yes dOUGHnuts, not just donuts. She also put together a goodie bag of great Huntsville mementos. Huntsville is an incredibly historic city with amazing antebellum buildings juxtaposed against the space center where things like space shuttles are designed. Here’s a Kate Gregory style photo of my treats except it’s on the hotel room desk not the bed.

She was also thoughtful in putting some late night snacks in the bag which was great because I didn’t eat very much pizza during the meeting and was a little hungry when I got back. Thanks Lori.

Although I hear that most of the INETA speakers stay at the Marriott by the Space Center so they can be near and go there before they leave, I opted for the Sheraton that is literally IN the airport. But I did get a post-meeting tour and got to see some rocket ships. Okay that was pretty cool!

The user group was great. I got some great feedback too  that will make me think twice about showing HOW Pablo Castro’s awesome query processor works and just show it do it’s magic. His code is so well documneted, that the few people who might want to see the internals can discover that for themselves later. Dave Burke would laugh. He teases me about the starry eyed look I get when I talk about ADO.NET and tries to remind me that not everyone finds the internals as fascinating as I do (which is very important to remember when speaking to a user group with broad variety of interests and experience. Korby Parnell swears that I said ‘excited" 23 times in my 90 minute ADO.NET talk at Deeper in .NET. A little embarrassing, but hopefully in a good way.

There were definitely some ringers in the group who asked some questions I couldn’t answer off the top of my head. With all of the high tech companies here, there are some amazingly smart people in the user group. I told them that if I wasn’t a walking encyclopedia, at least I was a walking rolodex and I can find someone to answer the questions for me. So I will blog those q’s and a’s in the near future.

Thanks to the Huntsville VS.NET group for being so very warm and welcoming. And thanks to INETA for getting me here!

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