I attended Tech Days in Ottawa this past Thursday. I stuck with the “Web Developer” stream all day and I have to say, I was a little disappointed.
To be fair I think I had very high expectations. I’ve been watching a lot of the PDC session videos online, videos of presentations by Oren Eini (aka Ayende Rahien) and attending Karl Seguin recent excellent presentation at ODNC. Needless to say, the people who presented at a one day conference in Ottawa (of all places) were not all of the same calibre. On top of that, the presentations and slide decks used are not created by the presenters. These are just people re-presenting someone else’s presentation (and in some cases re-telling someone else’s jokes).
The conference’s swag bag, or rather box, was a cereal box of “Techie Crunch” with some relatively good stuff including:
- 6 month TechNet subscription (but I already have a 1 year subscription)
- Full version of Visual Studio 2008 Professional (already have this too)
- Full version of Expression Web 2 (no source control support, not even for Visual SourceSafe. BOO!)
- Full TechEd DVD set (this is actually AWESOME)
The last one includes hundreds of presentations, including the presentations I attend, but presented by the original presenters, by engaging and entertaining people.
Ironically, the best presentation I attended all day was given by a man with a primarily Unix/Linux background who nearly completely skipped over the Microsoft specific topics in the slide desk he was presenting.