Ann Arbor Day of .NET

This past Saturday (and the weekend in general, actually) was a unique experience for me, and I loved every minute of it. Case in point: the Ann Arbor Day of .NET was held at Washtenaw Community College on Saturday from 9am to 5pm. It was my first tech conference since college.

I covered a wide range of topics throughout the five one-hour sessions. My day in brief looked like this (these are not the actual titles of the sessions):

• Wii Remote: This session covered the basics of the WiimoteLib C# and VB.NET library. This open-source library interfaces with a Wii Remote via bluetooth and exposes all kinds of functionality. We saw several real-world examples of the Wii Remote being used in C# applications. This was my personal favorite session.

• Javascript with Test Driven Development: We saw examples of why JavaScript should be treated like a true programming language and not the sometimes-throwaway tool that it can be on the client. I just about fell asleep during this session, not because it was sometimes a bit slow of a presentation, but because the room was packed with people and the heat of the day was getting to me. I did come away with new knowledge of JavaScript (closure, anyone?)

• Lunch: Dominoes pizza was fantastic, as was catching up with two of my co-workers.

• MVC and jQuery: By 1pm, the muggy, 80-degree heat began to pile on like crazy, so my session with ASP.NET MVC and jQuery was a bit hard to sit through, but I did learn the basics of MVC, which I feel is crucial since it seems to be a growing alternative to Web Forms-based websites. jQuery is always neat, and I saw a few solid examples that helped me grasp the amazing JavaScript library.

• The State of Mono: Mono, the open-source implementation of the Microsoft CLI for .NET applications, was discussed in-length. I found this session very interesting, as I would definitely like my C# desktop applications to run on Linux or Mac whenever possible, so I will be looking to support Mono in my future applications. The presenter was highly knowledgeable and passionate about this work, which was very apparent due to the breadth and depth of his lecture.

• HTML 5 and CSS3: A super-short presentation on new tags and elements supported in HTML 5 and new properties in CSS3. This presentation was short (20 minutes), and did not go nearly as deep into the technologies as I hoped. In fact, I was rather disappointed by this lecture overall. The lecturer did not seem super-knowledgeable on the topic, or at least in a way that translated well to my geek-oriented programming mind.

All-in-all, the day was a success, and I look forward to upcoming Day of .NET events. The Ann Arbor event was a perfect mix of location (close to home), sessions (an interesting topic in every timeslot), price (cheap!), and length (one-hour sessions were pretty tolerable). Sometimes I question if my interests in programming are enough to maintain a full, life-long career. Events such as Day of .NET certainly boost my morale on that front.

B3 out.