Hello,
I will not bother your time with my experiences, in the airport, early arrival into the Hotel, and unfortunately I was to sick to do anything then rest in my hotel, until it was time to go to the bloggers event.
Even to that I was late. But I got the feel of it, and got the lovely bloggers goody box.
I attended the main Keynote, which I suspect was too long, and I left it with a growing headache that didn't help me with my Indian illness.
I Admit that I was surprised, In the bubble I'm living in I thought that everyone could develop LINQ even if waken up in the middle of night, but I was wrong, major part of the audience just gape on the first linq expressions, I was very deprest of being intreduced to Linq again.
I also thought that Laurence part of not that impressive and Yochai can take the lightsaber act much more than he did. I think it is fun when you have a recognizable act, that becomes part of whatpeople get to know you by. I just had the feeling that Yochai wanted to become serious, but the change was to sudden from his hasty entrance. It was a nice try to make the keynote really into code, and I liked Shash's trivia, although it felt unconnected to the rest of the keynote. I had a feeling he got introduced as a bizarre notion of a comic relief. But still it was to heavy for this part of the day, getting into workflow was to much for most of the crowd, and most of the crowd got to much information.
I also got the feeling they (Galit and Yochai) were very nervous, and it took them time to get into the rhythm of facilitating an event of that magnitude.
So next session I went to hear the "Software Strategy" Session. I decided to go to this session by using the elmination system, I don't like VB, my knowledge of VS2008 is fairly good, let's hear something new.
It was very disappointing session, it was a Microsoft vision marketing session. I was hoping for really best practices and strategy guidelines of building new application.
I was wrong, I thought that maybe because I am sick it didn't work for me, but it was both sides I guess.
After that I had to give up the next session, and I got back to my room.
Not to much to say about the marketing evening. It was fun to socialize with people but nothing more than that.
Ariel