My first professional conference that I was actually registered for was Visual Studio LIVE (I was invited to crash the Agile Open at UCI a couple weeks ago at the behest of my manager to participate in a coding dojo). I was only able to go two of the three days as my team needed me back for quarterly planning. I thought it was a good conference. There was a lot of information to take in, but nothing directly related to my current project so it wasn’t overwhelming with information and a new zeal to try everything I saw or research this and that like hack.summit. But it was still amusing to hear how .NET Core is cross-platform at almost every talk I went to.

In general, the conference was Angular 2-heavy, followed by .NET Core and Azure. The keynote on the first day was interesting as it started off with DevOps, then turned into a .NET Core talk. I skipped most of the general session on the second day (needed a breath and some recovery time), but went in and out towards the end. Xamarin workbooks seems like a really cool concept. Plus the shameless plug for a $10 iOS/iPad app to develop code on that compiled and ran in real time.

I attended three Angular 2 talks, two by Deborah Kurata and one by Dan Wahlin. I’ve seen a couple of courses by Deborah Kurata, so I was curious to listen to her live and she was a good presenter. She got a rough feel of the expertise of the crowd in the beginning then explained concepts at a low enough level for everyone to understand. For example, she spent time explaining the parallels between TypeScript and C#. Dan Wahlin often pops up in my ASP.NET searches with his prolific blog posts on the subject. He was also a good speaker.

I went to a few ASP.NET, MVC, C#, and .NET Core talks. These were given by various speakers I had not heard of before and were often Microsoft MVP consultants. The quality varied. Some gave good talks, others were kind of so-so.

I was disappointed by a few of the talks I was really looking forward to learning a lot from. One was Azure DevOps 101. Unfortunately half of it was taken up by explaining what the Scrum board looked like and since I’ve been working with it for 9 months now, it was redundant information. I did get a glimpse of what automated build deployment looks like in Azure (and in general). I was texting my coworker about how Azure supports Maven and Jenkins builds, which is what my current project uses.

Another talk I was disappointed by was the tools for modern web development. The basic gist was front-end build tools (e.g., Gulp, Grunt, etc.) have such a high rate of churn that it wasn’t worth spending a lot of time explaining the current tools in depth. Instead, it was a demo mostly of how Visual Studio is smart enough to hook into those build tool config files and determine if it needs to run any of those processes.

The final talk I was disappointed by was authentication between APIs, which is a current problem I have. There was a lot of information on Azure TFS, a bunch of general vocab terms regarding authentication, but nothing really on OAuth2 besides side-mentions. The summary and opening was a little misleading (the speaker basically said if you had never heard of OAuth 2, you were in the right room).

I really wanted to go to the Docker talk that Dan Wahlin gave and the DevOps for developers talk by another speaker on the final day, but made the bad decision to go to work for the full day instead of half. Another bummer is they don’t record the talks, just the slides and code are available, so I miss out on the context. I found the slides in a lot of presentations were generic bullet points, but the real specifics were in the demo or the speaker talking about it in depth.

Oh, and did I mention I didn’t get a t-shirt because they gave it out on the last day? Though if I had asked, I could have given them my survey the before leaving at the end of the day on the second day in exchange for the t-shirt? I keep telling myself I don’t need any more t-shirts, though.

Other logistics… breakfast, lunch, and the afternoon snacks were excellent. Given the conference was at a good hotel (Hyatt Regency), the quality of the food matched. There was also Starbucks coffee and Tazo tea in the morning and at afternoon snack.

The first day had breakfast sandwiches, the second just bagels which I passed on because people were crowded around the toasters. Lunch was a buffet and the selection was good — typically 2-3 “salads” (guaranteed 1 was a twist on a green/lettuce salad), 2 carb selections (e.g., shrimp over rice, polenta cakes), 2 protein selections (1 red meat, 1 fish), 1 “side” (e.g, chips & guac, Texas toast), 1 soup (tortilla soup, Italian meatball), 3 selections for dessert (berries that were often spiked with something alchoholic, “tiramisu”, cannoli, etc.). The afternoon snack on the first day was baked pretzels, which I skipped because there was only one station and the line was a bit long than I wanted to wait in. On the second day, there was a selection of lemon bar, brownies, and pecan pie bar.

Let’s just say it wasn’t good for my weight.

I was excited to go to the conference as it was local and my dad was willing to give me a ride. Saved myself the hassle of reimbursing parking ($27/day!) and driving through traffic, which is something I desperately need. It was also not too bad because a few of my coworkers also went and there were always familiar faces to eat lunch with instead of talking and meeting new people (yes, yes, that is the point of going to conferences, but hi, introvert). Though, one brave manager joined our table on the second day and we got acquainted. I was surprised he had used our products and knew our company.

I might consider going again, depending on the speaker line up and topics. I got some tips from a veteran coworker who has gone to the old conference when it was only in Redmond. Basically attend the talks by Microsoft employees over consultants and MVPs. If nothing else, the food is worth it (joke!).