I had a great trip to Little Rock for Tech Expo 2008. It was great seeing several familiar faces from my old stomping grounds. As usual the drive was not fun, but Tommy Norman was riding along so it was not boring. The final numbers for the event were 200 registered and 130 in attendance. This was the first event for Terry Horton and Larry Taylor and they both did a tremendous job keeping things running smoothly. Great job guys!!!
My C# 3.0 session in the morning was to a full room and a pretty active crowd. I had several great questions from the attendees. Since I didn't have any books to give away I offered one person a free pass to devLink 2008 instead. It was a great discussion and I even unveiled some C# 2.0 capabilities that some of the audience were not familiar with.
I landed the short straw for my afternoon session and presented right after lunch. I was covering LINQ and fortunately over half the audience had attended my C# earlier. There were some great questions, but it definitely went quickly. The large room unfortunately made it difficult to hear questions from those in the back, but we made due.
On Wednesday night some of the speakers, Michael Neel, Tommy Norman, Raymond Lewellan, Wally McClure and your's truly, met for dinner at West End Smokehouse and Tavern which was fun. I even had the opportunity to clear up a mystery for Michael Neel about how Warren Buffett did not make his billions singing Margarittaville. Unfortunately, poor Alan Stevens was not able to join us as he was on the red-eye from Redmond. The busiest speaker of the day was Todd Anglin from Telerik; he had two general sessions, a lunch product discussion and the closing keynote.
On a more personal note, Michael Neel is never allowed to recommend a hotel to me again. All the Tech Expo speakers, minus a quick thinking Raymond Lewellan, stayed at the same hotel. While I will not divulge the name, I will say it was less than stellar. My room featured a bathroom door with no screws in the hinges, a broken TV and the phone had been ripped out of the wall. I was able to fix the phone so I could get a wakeup call the next day since someone had stolen the alarm clock. While that may sound bad my room was better than poor Tommy Norman's. He had to sleep in his clothes as his bed was emitting an unappealing odor. The hotel's wireless router had been installed in Michael Neel's room.
Overall I think the Tech Expo trip was definitely worthwhile. Little Rock still has an active developer community and should be proud of what they accomplished at this year's event.
The demo solutions from my presentations are located here.
