Day 2 was a mixed bag.  The keynote given by Prashant Sridharan was entertaining, and I have got to check out the rest of the VS 2005 ad campaign he gave us a glimpse at.  The stats of downloads and popularity of 2005 is impressive.  I hope we continue to see the widespread acceptance of .NET in the field.  There will always be detractors, but there have been a LOT of converts.

The first session I was to attend was "Deep Dive into ObjectDataSource", and was supposed to be given by Stefan Schackow.  Unfortunately, there was a last minute change of speakers.  I don't remember his name, but he was very hard to understand, and rushed through the material.  He seemed to know his stuff, but I started nodding off way too often (even more than usual for me).

Adding insult to injury, when I got to the second session, which I was looking forward to ("Creating Dynamic Web Sites with ASP .NET 2.0 Web Parts", I discovered that it was swapped with the first session, so I missed it.  If I only knew -- I would have skipped the ObjectDataSource session for this.  Oh, well.  So instead, I went to Keith Smith's "Web Application UI Integrating Master Pages".  Keith was very good, with a lot of enthusiasm.  I wish he had time to cover everything he wanted; he seemed rushed in the second half.  I learned a lot from this.  I didn't realize how powerful this is.

I was pleasantly surprised when I realized Keith was also giving the next session I went to after lunch -- "Using Visual Studio Team System to Build Enterprise ASP .NET Web Applications."  My company is seriously considering TS, and this session definitely gave me incentive to look at this sooner rather than later.  I had bought the "Open Source .NET Development" book a day earlier (amazing selection of books being sold here, by the way), because I wanted to compare some of the incredible looking open source tools for agile .NET development as a possible alternative to some of the TS tools.  I had heard that MS's first try with TS was "nice try, but not quite there yet."  That may be true, but I still think it's worth diving into.

Next was Mike Hernandez's "The Power of Office Development in Managed Code".  I wanted to see MSTO in action, because we do some integration with Excel.  Mike was also enthusiastic, and MSTO is definitely something worth looking into if your company makes a lot of use of MS Office.  I just wish Outlook support looked more mature.  I'd rather hook into Outlook from outside it than creating plug-ins.  It's already overflowing.

I just had to check out Mark Miller and CodeRush at the DevExpress exhibitor booth.  He is amazing, a workaholic (claims he hasn't had a vacation in over 10 years), and a maniac!  He's also brilliant, and so seems CodeRush and Refactor.  I hope I didn't bug him too much with all my questions.  Probably not -- he recommended I come to his presentation later this week, which I planned on, anyway .  I know what I want for my birthday!

Finally, I attended Scott Guthrie's session, "Tips & Tricks for ASP .NET 2.0 and VS 2005."  He is a legend, of course, and he has a great presence and delivery.  A lot of cool stuff -- and all the sample code and slides are already linked to on his blog (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/04/03/441787.aspx).  He comes prepared!