When I wasn’t mingling and being a community “bod”, I was lucky enough to be able attend a number of sessions. Generally, because some of the web and design content was a little bit outside my developer sphere of awareness, I sat in on some the sessions that were being delivered by the presenters that I wanted to record a podcast with, which prove to be a good learning experience for me.
That’s one lucky winner – an XBOX 360 (watch out, Rich might mug you!), a copy of Microsoft Windows Vista and Expression Studio – can’t be bad!
Keynote
The keynote sessions was a 90 minute affair – somewhat long for a keynote you might think. However, nothing could be further from the truth – it was an exciting and well-paced session offering industry insights into the real-world use of Silverlight as well as a handful of Microsoft showcases. If anybody was bored during the keynote, then they couldn’t have been in the room with the rest of us, it was a truly engaging session.
Scott Guthrie delivered his usual top notch session about Building Silverlight Applications using .NET. If you’ve never seen Scott speak, and you have an opportunity, I can strongly recommend that you attend, he’s a “don’t miss” speaker.
Each bag contained a copy of Microsoft Windows Vista and Expression Studio – a bag for each and every attendee!
Micro-presentations
I snuck into The Phantom Micro-presentations session. Essentially this was a freeform session with anybody who was prepared to deliver 20 slides getting their 6 and bit minutes of fame! Except, the 20 slides had to be timed to run for 20 seconds with an auto-transition to the next slide engaged. This made for an interesting session, even for many experienced presenters, myself included! I delivered a micro-presentation about Social Networking and Micro-Blogging – except I chose to actually write the session whilst I was sat in on the original session! Download my micro-presentation here. Expect to see this micro-presentation at DDD6 in November!
Are you afraid of the Blue Monster?
Hugh MacLeod, of Blue Monster fame, gave a 35 minute presentation about viral marketing, Web 2.0, his own personal thoughts and the notion of cartoons on the back of business cards. The remaining 25 minutes was filled with audience interaction, it worked rather well. Hugh’s presentation style, both in terms of slide deck and personal delivery were eye-openers for me – sometimes we need to see a totally new style in order for us to learn and improve. Podcast here.
Scott Guthrie entertains more than just Phil and Dave during an impromptu coding and demo session in the Community Lounge – this is what community is all about, you should have been there!
Viral Marketing
Jim McNiven, Londoner through and through, discussed viral marketing. Unfortunately as a result of some minor schedule changes, Jim’s session was up against Hugh MacLeod’s sessions. I did consider doing what I usually do under these circumstances and “multi-thread it” by visiting both sessions for short periods of time, but that wasn’t really on offer as an option – partly because it would have appeared rather rude to Hugh, whose session I sat in on. I recorded a podcast with Jim, you can find it here.
Men of Iron
Michael Foord was talking about IronRuby and Dave Verwer (blog) provided a session about IronPython. Sadly I was elsewhere for both of these sessions, but I did manage to catch up with both of them over the course of the day. Podcast here.
Books On-line
Designing and delivering 3D solutions on the web saw a handful of presenters demonstrate a solution that is being developed for the British Library. This was an truly awe-inspiring using of 3D, rich media and Silverlight. Imagine being able to take a book, essentially pick it up, rotate it in 3D, zoom in on specific focal points within the current page. I recorded some video content – expect to see that appear very shortly. I also recorded a podcast with the books on-line chaps, that will be ready on Thursday.
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