Tulsa School of Dev - LINQ

I gave my Advanced LINQ presentation again at Tulsa's School of Dev. It was another great session with a lot of participation from the audience. It's funny how my best presentations are the ones where I don't do all of the talking! :)

As a whole, the event was awesome. It's always good to touch base with others who are active in the development community. I also attended a few really cool presentations. Ken Byrd started me off with a talk on jQuery. Even though I've been using it for a while and the talk was a "basics" talk, I picked up a few new nuggets and that is always cool. I then got to see Zain Naboulsi talk about design patterns. It was another basics talk, but watching him is always worth it as he's such an animated speaker.

The gem of the day was a talk by Chris Patterson about Event Driven Architecture. In the code demo he used Mass Transit of course (which was very cool), but the incredible thing to me was the massive mind shift I experienced during the presentation.

For some reason, I've always disliked messaging. It always seemed like a huge house of cards waiting to come crumbling down. I think it may be due to a few poor implementations I've had to work on. Whatever - I was a knucklehead regardless of the excuse.

In the time span of one hour, Chris made a bunch of connections for me and really caused me to rethink my opinions. I have no idea how I'll be able to take advantage of this new information where I work, but you can bet I'll be thinking about it. Very cool stuff.

On top of that, I won a copy of VS 2008 Pro! In fact, I rode over with Jay Smith and Devlin Liles (thanks for driving, Devlin!) and all three of us came home with prizes.

The only other interesting thing about the day was the weather. Below was my view from where I went to smoke. Despite all the snow, it cleared in time to be an uneventful drive home. Very odd!

See you at the Northwest Arkansas Code Camp