Yesterday held the fifth of the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper days at Microsoft in Reading and it looks like everyone had another great, free, Saturday’s worth of training, interaction and socialising.

(From left to right: Phil Winstanley, Dave McMahon, Alan Dean, Craig Murphy, Gary Short, Guy Smith-Ferrier)

This is the first one where I’ve been involved in the organization of DDD and it changed the DDD experience for me mainly in that there were so many other things to do that I really didn’t spend much time in other people’s sessions. I did, however, make a point of going to see Andy Westgarth and his IIS7 For ASP.NET Developers session. I was impressed. Andy really knows his stuff and the information content of his session was really high. I was quite pleased with my own session on Visual Studio 2005 IDE Tips And Tricks; it was the first time I had given this presentation and that always makes me on edge a little. The session itself is a slightly different style to my normal presentation as it is a straight 60 minute demo of tip after tip after tip. As such it is easy to keep people’s attention because if someone doesn’t like one tip then there’ll be another one along in a minute. On the other hand as each tip is small there are no profound moments of thought provoking discovery such as people got with sessions like Alan Dean’s An Appraisal of "Object Thinking" or Dan Taylor’s Evolutionary Algorithms and the Travelling Salesman - both of which I would have liked to have seen and heard good things about.

All in all I enjoyed it just as much as any other DDD. If you attended DDD then please don’t forget to fill out your eval forms online here. Also remember that all of the sessions in Chicago 1 were recorded and will be available on the DDD site soon. And finally be aware that we are thinking about holding a DDD ’north’ at some point - I will be sure to post more details here when I get them.

Technorati tags: DDD5, Visual Studio