Well, soon I’ll be off to MIX09!
I can’t wait to go, but already we’re off to a rocky start. The first Keynote starts at 9am with registration and the breakfast anytime before that. That’s not bad but I probably won’t even show up in Vegas until 2am that morning to say nothing of checking in and finally falling asleep. This is because we have our Inland Empire .Net User Group the night before. Tom Opgenorth is presenting on ASP.Net MVC. He is a great speaker and this is a great topic. Tom is the guy who got me back into TDD and, after playing with MVC for about 6 months, I’m excited to ask him some detailed questions. If you missed his presentation on TDD you’re in luck. We recorded it and you can view the entire session on the user group website in the Videos section. So anyway, the meeting will end about 9:30, so by the time I pack up, hit Starbucks and head out I’ll probably be pulling into Vegas at ~2am. Rough day when you want to be conscious during the keynote.
Anyway, before all that we had a great plan. About 8 of us were going to leave the meeting together and caravan to Vegas. Now, through various schedule changes and some bosses reneging on their approval we’re down to 5 in the caravan. No big but it kind of lets the steam out when your “party group” gets cut in half. But, those of us going are still jazzed and ready to hit the town.
To add to the misery my kids have been pretty sick. It’s the saddest thing to see your two year old just absolutely miserable with a cold. :( Anyway, he has graciously let me participate in that I’m starting to come down with it. I hope I am not full blown sick in Vegas. 🙁
OK, on to the real topic (about time!):
So, as I am architecting a site for my new department in MVC I am hitting most of the MVC talks. Silverlight 3 is probably one of the main focuses of the event along with Windows Azure. However, I have no actual business use for Silverlight 3 yet (mainly due to the technical restrictions hampering Silverlight’s adoption for my clients) so that’s just eye candy that I don’t have time for. Also, most of the Azure talks are fairly elementary, rehashing the same “What is Azure” topics. I’ve seen most of this stuff and, again, have no real practical use at my paying job for it so I’ll skip most of these as well. I am checking out the Azure Storage because I’m interested in queues, however, since I’m leaning towards SDS I could easily find myself in another session.
That leaves me with MVC. Prior to my move to a new department I have been working with MVC for the last 6 months on a particular project, which coincidentally was for my new department. Now that I’m in my new position this task has grown. The entire department site will be hosted in MVC with several sub-apps based on various technologies, including MVC. So, naturally I’m hitting most of these.
I’m the dev guy who puts a high emphasis on “usability” but wish could design better. So, for Friday afternoon I’m not sure whether to go for the “Advance Your Design with UX Design Patterns" session (quince looks like a great tool!) or the mini sessions on Infographics and Microformats. I don’t care about the “UI discussion” much so I’ll probably hit the UX Design Patterns session at 12:30 and then skip out to see 12:55, or I may just stay for the whole thing. Whatever I miss I can catch later from the online recordings.
Here’s my schedule for those of you who happen to be interested:
Day 1 – Wednesday
| Time | Activity |
| 9:00 AM | Keynote – Bill Buxton & Scott Guthrie |
| 11:30 AM | RESTful Services for the Programmable Web with WCF – Ron Jacobs |
| 12:45 PM | Lunch |
| 2:15 PM | ??? – Not sure what I want to go to yet. Have an idea? 🙂 |
| 4:00 PM | How’d they do it? Real App. Real Code. Two Weeks. Nothing but .NET – Scott Hanselman |
| 6:00 PM | Attendee Party at TAO Las Vegas |
Day 2 – Thursday
| Time | Activity |
| 9:00 AM | Keynote – Deborah Adler & Dean Hachamovitch |
| 10:30 AM | Windows Azure Storage – Brad Calder |
| 11:45 PM | Lunch |
| 1:00 PM | Securing Web Applications – Eric Lawrence |
| 2:30 PM | File|New -> Company: Creating NerdDinner.com with Microsoft ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) – Scott Hanselman |
| 4:15 PM | ASP.NET MVC: America’s Next Top Model View Controller Framework – Phil Haack |
| 6:00 PM | Movie Screening: Objectified |
Day 3 – Friday
| Time | Activity |
| 9:00 AM | Microsoft ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC): Ninja on Fire Black Belt Tips – Phil Haack |
| 10:45 AM | There’s a Little Scripter In All of Us – Building a Web App For the Masses – Rob Conery |
| 12:00 PM | Lunch |
| 12:30 PM | Advance Your Design with UX Design Patterns – Ambrose Little |
| 12:30 PM | User Experience Design for Non-Designers – Shawn Konopinsky |
| 12:55 PM | Effective Infographics with Interactivity – Joshua Allen |
| 1:20 PM | Oomph: A Microformat Toolkit – Tim Aidlin |
| 2:00 PM | Building High Performance Web Applications and Sites – John Hrvatin |