devLink 2007 Recap

My wife and I got back from Nashville last night and we had a great time. While she went around shopping at garage sales and hanging out with family, I got to spend some time with some great developers at devLink. The conference was incredible. I’m still amazed that they were able to do so much with only $50, but no complaints here :-)

Here are a few of the high points from the conference:

Keith Elder had a great presentation on the Enterprise Library. It was especially good to hear from someone who is using EntLib successfully from a WinForms perspective. I also got to talk to him a little after his presentation on some of their techniques for storing configuration across smart client applications.

Josh Holmes is a great speaker. I’m not at all surprised that he is one of the hosts for the new Code To Live! show. He is clearly passionate about the coding craft. He shared some great information about the DLR with us.

I got to hear Dave Laribee talk about Domain Driven Design, which was great. I also spoke with him about ALT.NET and Microsoft’s upcoming MVC framework for ASP.NET. He told me that there are already plans for the next ALT.NET conference which is great news.

Ron Jacobs had the closing keynote on Saturday evening that covered Test Driven Development and the Model View Presenter architecture. It was a great presentation and it was encouraging to have Microsoft’s presence there encouraging and pushing TDD.

One of the best things about the conference was how approachable everyone was. I got to meet a lot of great people and I even got the change to give Colin grief about winning the blogging contest (not that you can give someone much grief about winning an Xbox 360). My only complaint was that I wasn’t able to attend some of the other presentations where there were schedule conflicts.

All in all, the conference was great. The staff and the presenters all did a great job.