I had the opportunity to escape from work today and attend Microsoft's Heroes Happen Here conference in Las Vegas.  For those unaware, it is essentially a produce release conference that Microsoft is doing all over the country through the end of June.  They are giving away free copies of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008, well worth the attendance even without the speaking sessions.  However, I did attend both the Data Platform (database-oriented) and Developer sessions.

My thoughts:

Data Platform session:  There was really nothing that wowed me here.  Granted, I'm a coder, but I have enough background in database management that it's not all just noise to me.  However, I thought the presentation was poorly arranged and delivered.  There seemed to be a couple of neat things (Resource Management, for one), but I didn't see many demos.  Our speaker's delivery was fairly awful; he was rather weak-voiced, wasn't very exciting to listen to, and would basically stop talking when something didn't go right, which happened often.  He appeared to be trying to run too much on his machine at once, which meant that all his demo time was sucked up trying to get the various application windows to switch back and forth.  The first two hours had a lot of dead air time that was making me think I should like to go eat a real breakfast rather than listen to him saying things like "it worked last night".  Skip this one if you have a chance.

Developer session:  Blew me away.  The speaker, Rob Bagby, was an incredible speaker, keeping the audience riveted, cracking jokes, and flying through code samples so fast it was almost difficult to follow him (almost).  He pretty much skipped over the boring marketing-type presentation slides and would go straight to the meat.  Plus, he demonstrated many different cool elements of .NET 3.5, including WPF, LINQ, extending Office applications, and web service-driven solutions.  He actually tied all of his demos into one continuous demonstration, building upon the system throughout the entire four-hour talk.  It was amazing and I learned a lot of new things, plus good reference material for replicating his process (he mentioned a screencast of the talk would be on his blog).  Despite his fast talk and fast coding, he did run out of time, provoking a mystery organizer to grab a mic and announce "This is not God, but it is 4:30".  Rob wrapped up nicely and left me excited to get home and play with my new software.

I highly encourage everyone to attend the Heroes event nearest to them, for the software, and for the Developer talk if possible.

Cheers!

Devan