I just got back from a day and a half at the VBUG Annual Conference.  It was a really good event for networking with some interesting and friendly developers.  It's interesting tracking what's happening to VB6 developers.  A slow drift to VB.NET seems to be a common story.  There's also still the tension between various styles of developers - those that are into architecture and the deeper workings of the system and those that are still concerned with string concatenation performance and how to use ADO.NET.

The drinks reception was an excellent chance to catch up with other speakers.  It was fun to hear Bill Vaughn's Microsoft War stories (like receiving a pager message to stop criticizing Access while he was still giving the presentation).  Tim Sneath was entertaining on the topics of blogs and did a commendable job of dealing with various developers’ comments on Microsoft.  He also recommended SourceGear Vault as the best source control tool.  I agree with him that Eric's blog is a good read.

I really enjoyed meeting up with Edward Garson and Mehran Nikoo from Dunstan Thomas who did a useful presentation on Service Oriented Architecture.  They revealed that they'd had a social gathering recently where they'd watched Don Box's presentation from the XML Dev-Con.  I revealed that my mum knows who Don Box is after seeing those videos.  These guys did a good job of joining the dots on what I've seen and read about recently.  The big revelation was the idea of having a Service Agent in the Data Access layer of one application managing calls to Web Services provided by another application.

My presentation went down well, though I had been up late at night using Reflector to convert my demos from C# into VB.NET (Man, line continuation characters, automatic formatting around brackets and having to put the Inherits statement on a new line are a real drag!).  It was also a challenge to condense a two-hour presentation down into 60 minutes.  Many people came up and said they found it useful and interesting - security and web services seem to be a common problem (one guy I met had hand-rolled WS-Security in VB6 - it took all summer he said).  I also got two more booking requests for other regional VBUG groups.