It was great to get a chance to see guys I haven’t seen in a while like: Roy, Chris, Dru, Jason, Jeremy, Dave, and that crazy posse known as the “Eleutian Guys“. I also had the opportunity to meet tons of new people including Adam Dymitruk, Chris Sutton, Scott Reynolds, Tim Barcz, and Greg Young. (If I left your name out I blame Greg as he overloaded my brain with this double double d stuff).

Listening to Greg and Udi talk about distributed messaging was fascinating. The idea of using asynchronous messaging and moving away from traditional request / response style of programming is something that I want to learn and work into my applications. I am not quite ready throw out my RDBMS but thinking about it as just “Dead Object Storage” is much more fun. I need to engage Adam Dymitruk to talk more about how his team made the transition to asynchronous messaging. He said with some of Greg’s help it was pretty painless and the benefits the team has seen are huge.

I made sure I left time to hang out after the conference was over this time. A number of people hung around for a while as well, of course the conversations continued through lunch, over to the book store, and back to the hotel. By 8pm on Sunday I was dead, I could only imagine what the guys who went to both the MVP Summit and alt.net felt like. Thanks to Roy, and TypeMock the stragglers got treated to one final meal where yes, more geek speak was spoken. Doc and I had a chance to talk for a while at dinner, he did another amazing job facilitating the conference.

So what’s next…

Scott Bellware spoke of organizing another alt.net like conference in Austin around October 10th or so.

Scott Hanselman posted a nice piece about the alt.net community in general.

Last night here in Chicago we had our 3rd alt.net meeting. Derik has a summary of the meeting on the yahoo group. If you are interested in writing better software, getting rid of some of that daily developer pain, or just knocking back a couple beers with some local devs I encourage you come to the next meeting.

Thanks again Dave and the rest the organizers for putting this one together. And a special thanks to the sponsors, Digipen, InfoQ, Microsoft P&P, ThoughtWorks, and VersionOne.

Now if I could only get a FF 2.0 and FF 3.0 side by side install going.

Since when did VS2k5 have a dependency on Adobe Flash?

I guess VS didn’t see this..

This tiny annoyance is only a single piece of the instability I am seeing all over my system.

This could go on for a long time so I will just stop here.

Oh… BTW Windows Live Writer stopped working after I published this post.  Its part of the new MRPP.