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Disclaimer The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway.
I love it when the community steps up and really shows me something new. This past weekend I attended Central Ohio Day of .NET. This was one of the first events in a while that I've been to where I was just a participant. It was refreshing. As always, they did a fantastic job putting on the event and pulling together top notch speakers and content to really put together a solid show. Most of the day I was really torn between at least 2 if not 3 talks that I wanted to see. I was not surprised by that - that's become the norm. Jim Holmes started the community conferences here in MI/OH/KY/TN (AKA Heartland District). That was picked up by Columbus and Ann Arbor who created the branding Day of .NET. That's inspired a lot of other conferences around the district including Memphis, Grand Rapids, Cleveland and so on. Each of these have between 150 and 300 attendees. Those are anchored by the two huge community conferences, DevLink in the fall in Nashville at around 400-500 attendees and CodeMash which is a completely different animal.
What I hadn't seen before was what Andy Erickson put together. He put together a 5 minute video of the Central Ohio Day of .NET conference and really captured the event. Visit Central Ohio Day of .NET 2008 to see the video. He obviously put in some real work on this video. He even started a little bit of buzz about the event by interviewing some of the conference organizers such as Mike Wood. Listen to Mike Wood and Day of .NET '08 for more on that. I really hope that more people will do this in the future. Even though I was there, there was a ton that I missed - like the fact that Michael Neel was there. Michael drove all the way up from Knoxville to Ohio to speak on the "Church of Agile". It's a fun and bizarre talk where he breaks out the Jedi garb and everything.
So, hats off to the organizers Jim Holmes, Mike Wood, Bob Sledge, Carey Payette and Justin Kohnen - they did an amazing job and I hope that they will continue to do so in the future.
Now I'm looking forward to speaking at the second annual West Michigan Day of .NET on May 10th, 2008. I'll be speaking on Architecting a Rich Internet Application. Jay Wren is going to be doing his Boo and DSL talk. Wally McClure is coming all the way from Knoxville to do his deep dive into the ASP.NET AJAX panel. Michael Eaton is going to be speaking on LightReader, a Silverlight feed reader. Really, there are two many great sessions to list them all. Hope to see you there!
If you miss that one (or really, even if you don't), you should try to make it to Cleveland Day of .NET! Again, they've got an amazing set of speakers and content. This is their first time but they're coming out swinging. Unfortunately, I won't be able to make that one personally but I'm hoping that someone will pull an Andy and catch me up on what I missed. :)