The NxtGen boys have done it again. Another success from John Price, Dave McMahon and Richard Costall.

Today I attended Fest07 and an excellent event it was too. The keynote with Rich and Dave started with a video montage of the NxtGen events of the last 12 months. Sadly the video won’t be available online so only the Fest07 attendees saw it but it really showed the creativity, energy and enthusiasm of this group. An excellent example for us all. They then went on to give out awards for the highest attendance (Jeff Lombardi with 28 (?) attendances in one year), best presentations and best nuggets at the Coventry, Birmingham and Oxford meetings. Excellent community spirit.

The first session of the day was the infamous Rafal Lucawiecki who I have eulogised about before. His first session of the day was on Vista Security and as usual was full of content.

I missed Daniel Moth and Mike Taulty doing their presentation on Language Enhancements and LINQ because this is the session that Mike Taulty gave at the first DotNetDevNet meeting.

The session after lunch was Rafal doing Software Development Paradigms and could be described as his finest hour if it weren’t for the fact that there were so many to choose from. This session was a masterful and unique journey through Rafal’s profoundly researched and convincing opinion on the future of software development including such ideas as using declarative workflows (ala Windows Workflow Foundation) in lambda expressions (ala LINQ). If Rafal presents this session at TechEd (and I suspect that he will) you should definately see this one - it is an absolute treat.

Next Oliver Sturm presented Dynamic Languages which fitted well into the sequence of sessions for the day. Oliver gave a good presentation but you’d have to feel sorry for anyone who has to follow Rafal.

The last tech session of the day was from Lorna Brown of Microsoft Research showing the fruits of the Microsoft Research team (in Cambridge)’s effort. Lots of devices and innovations for technology in your home life. Fascinating stuff. Lorna is on the same team as Richard Banks (the one with the fascinating blog that is read by Bill Gates).

The final event of the day was the obligatory NxtGen swag fest that this time was called Swaggily Fortunes. More mindless swag fun from the boys who have a swag fixation and don’t know how to stop. I got to be on the home team this time and we trashed the Microsoft team and saved the day for the NxtGen User Group (and when I say ’trashed’ I mean ’narrowly beat on the last question of the afternoon’).

Well done, NxtGen boys, an excellent event done in classic NxtGen style!

See you next year.