Leaving Las Vegas

Tomorrow is my last day here in Vegas, the N+I conference is wrapping up and I’m going to be heading home to Redmond. Overall it was an interesting experience, I’ve never attended a non-developer focused conference before and it was quite a different type of crowd then I’m used to. The questions at the VS.NET 2003 booth were mostly “What is …. Visual Studio… ?” I’m pretty sure some of the folks who came up to me thought it was some form of graphics editing suite, due to the Visual part of the name. Over the course of the day there were certainly lots of developer questions (some of which were quite in-depth), I just wasn’t used to so many non-developers wanting me to explain VS to them…

The most interesting aspect of the conference has to be the booth next to us… Sprint had set up a large trampoline and some guys were strapping downhill skies on and performing all sorts of acrobatic feats. Now, I know there was some explanation for this behaviour (freestyle ski training… sure… whatever), but I’m thinking that it was a dare gone horribly wrong… building and building until it turned into “I dare you to strap skies on and jump on a trampoline at a major conference!” All of that bouncing and bending and ski booting certainly attracted the crowds, but I think most of them were there just hoping to see some sort of terribly tragic trampoline accident.

Speaking of terribly tragic accidents… I wrote quite a few quick ASP.NET apps in front of customers at this event. General Rule: don’t let this Windows Forms guy near ASP.NET in a public place, I can make it look a lot harder than it needs to be!