Around 160 delegates turned out on a sunny warm English Saturday to attend the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper day.  Judging by the comments on Channel 9 (great to see so many UK people using that site) it seems to have been a great success.  It was great to catch up with so many different people, such as Santosh Benjamin, Phil Winstanley, Ian Cooper, Mike Taulty, Jonathan Hodgson and many other blogless, but nevertheless interesting people.  Simon Harriyott moblogged the event and was kind enough to give me a lift back into Reading.  He also continued his analysis of Australian accents in IT ("data down under").

Although I enjoyed giving my talk 'Web Services in .NET 2.0: Solving Today's Problems' I made a fundamental mistake of staying up too late the night before the talk.  Filled with the pleasure of finally having Visual Studio 2005 installed on my laptop (Jon Rowett caught the bug as well), I got carried away crafting a flashy demo with streaming JPEG images (using IXmlSerializable) and databinding to the results of the webservice calls.  As a result I was 'dog tired' as Ian Smith noticed and didn't present as well as I would have liked.  Dave Oliver wasn't so sure of the value of using IXmlSerializable to stream a large file over web services.  Lesson learnt.  Next time I'll get a good night's sleep and focus on small, easy to understand demonstrations.

The highlight of the sessions for me was seeing Brian Long go through .NET debugging capabilities.  He obviously had a command of the topic, managed to demo the command line debuggers for an hour without a single typo and had a great dry sense of humour.  He's done a lot of talks with the Developers Group here in the UK, which came out of the Borland Developers Group.  I love the fact that the .NET community has benefited from so many people with Delphi experience. 

To finish, Jon Rowett has a good write-up of the day as does Dave Oliver and Richard says "All in all, a very worthwhile way to spend a Saturday - the kind of training day that usually would cost the best part of £1000 per participant. Something I’d definitely do again if the opportunity arose."

Thanks again to Craig Murphy for taking the lead in organising the event and Jonathan Hodgson for doing the website.