Four Geeks, a road trip and a conference

Well here I am writing my first post on my new blog. With any luck this new one will be kept upto date and be of use to the world. This weekend the Developer Developer Developer community was holding its fourth conference at Microsoft UK in Reading. 4 of us at New Mind went down on Friday night to be all ready for the conference on Saturday. After a grueling day in work the prospect of a long journey was not welcoming however everyone was in good spirit and after a hearty meal we set off. Now this is where the fun begins :D I brought the works tablet with me and Thom had his new SPV (which Derek was very excited about), a crazy idea of networking these two devices, bridging the SPV's odem to try to get on the net as well trying to access the SPV's built in web server suddenly semmed very appealing as we joined onto the M6. Now sadly after a good hour of faffing with the devices we could only get the wifi network up and access file shares and the tablets web server, tinkering with the SPV's webserver ended up being a no no :( There's always next time. The DDD4 conference was very good, it was my first time at Microsoft and I was very impressed, looks like a nice environment to work in. The hospitality provided by Microsoft was also very good, lots of refreshments and plenty to eat. I attended four sessions and listened to the lunch time grok talkros. Each session trigger some thought proccesses mainly ideas but beneficial none the less. The main thoughts from the sessions were: what an impact using string builder has on .Net performance, i knew it was better but had not seen examples. Ruby on rails is magic but probably not that exciting once you have seen the magic once. The main thing i like about rails is the Database migration stuff, that looked very good and something we could do with in the office. Sarah Blow's session on Web 2.0 although not bringing anything new did highlight how new tech should be used more, having a wiki, blog, podcasts etc should all be brought together and used together rather than a bit here and a bit there. Finally the javascript session clarified objects and how you can bodge namespaces. ! The groktalks were short bursts of interesting tidbits, the MCML stuff looked interesting, the vista speech recognition was very cool and although Thoms was unprepared did highlight a new avenue of web api i hadnt thought about. How jammy was he with winning the MSDN subscription! Overall a good weekend and am looking forward to attending barcamp and the next DDD. Hopefully tomorrow ill finish my template for this blog so it doesnt look so stadard and this week i will post about my recent and current developments with using Ajax in .Net and in more detail in PHP using SAJAX all good fun i can assure you :D