VSLive, and MCAD.NET
I attended VSLive in San Francisco last week. It was good, but not great. The previous two years I had attended Connections instead, so this year I decided to go back to VSLive. I think I'll be going back to Connections next year instead :)
Except for one thing: VSLive this year had certification testing, at half price. I had taken 70-310 (WebServices) in November, and planning to take 70-305 (Web) soon anyway. So, I decided to really cram hard and take both that and 70-306 (Windows) while at the conference. I did, and I passed both handily!
So, as far as I'm concerned, it was a GREAT conference :) Now to study up for the MCSD and MCDBA....
So, what was good and bad about the conference?
GOOD: Certification Testing, SQL classes by Kimberly Tripp, seeing family in San Francisco, and a book that I found at the book vendor that I hadn't seen before. Also, they had LOTS of computers on site so you could login, check your email, or whatnot. LOTS. The vendor area was HUGE. Did you know Jeff McManus works for EBay now? And, we did get to see the video of Bill dancing in "Great Moments at Work."
BAD: As usual the MS speakers were late, had the wrong slides, and in at least one case decided to do a different class than the one scheduled. The percentage of bad/mediocre classes to good ones was quite high. An entire day was spent on Whidbey. The ASP and SQL tracks were virtually non-existent.
At least the hotel had high speed internet :) Which is why I skipped Connections. The last two years, they have been in a place with no broadband. What are they thinking?
Legacy Comments
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Stan C.
2004-04-01 |
re: VSLive, and MCAD.NET The last VSLive! I went to was in 2000 (Orlando) and I thought it was pretty good. I decided to try it out in San Francisco this year and I must say it was not nearly as good. In fact, if it weren't for the keynotes (which really were more entertaining than educational) and Kimberly Tripp, I'd say the conference would be a total loss. Now I'm working up to a rant, sigh. The C# track was particularly abysmal. It featured speakers who were ill-prepared except for the inside jokes they had with friends in the back of the audience. Then we had a section "Top 10 tips blah blah Whidbey Longhorn Make It Up As We Go" which had nothing to do with Longhorn or Whidbey or useful tips. It featured such great insights as "use stored procedures for performance" and "use the smart C# comments to make your code readable". Uh, yeah, luminaries in the house! Oh, and some dude standing on stage with a bass guitar around his neck pretending to be an MC / Rockstar and plastering his website on every slide and demanding you fork over your name and address via his vendor booth to get code samples from the session. I'm not sure what happened over the last three years but it's a far cry from those old times, my friend. I'm definetly not renting this movie again. |