Ann Arbor Day of .NET
The Ann Arbor Day of .NET TOTALLY rocked. This event was organized by the Great Lakes Area .NET User Group, Ann Arbor Day of .NET Group, and the Northwest Ohio .NET User Group. The effort was largely lead by Josh Holmes, (Ann Arbor/Gang), John Hopkins (Gang) and Jason Follas (NWNUG). There were about 16 speakers for the event, my self included- many of whom were MVP's, User Group Learders, INETA speakers, or all three in some cases :)
Bill Gates & Steve Ballmer would have been proud. This event was all about developers- by developers, for developers. Everyone who came and organized the event volunteered. Around 150 people showed for the event (220 registered). There were 4 tracks and all of them had some great content, especially the Atlas talk (shameless plug) :) I was happy to have a full room with people standing in the back. Hopefully everyone enjoyed the talk and learned something. Also, special thanks to ScottGu for helping me pull together some slides.
We had around 30 sponsors for the event. We had a formiddable "Swag Wagon" loaded up at the end of the event. EVERYONE was a winner at least once... The swag we gave away totaled over $40,000 in retail value!! Special thanks to Wiley, Microsoft, Addison-Wiley and Apress for donating the books. We had everyone in the room raise their hand if they won a book and got a great picture (75% of the room had books)- hopefully Josh will post it.
After doing some ad-hoc interviews, I kept hearing things like "This was totally better than what I expected." and "Wow, I can't believe how well-done this is!". And best of all "I'm definitely coming back next year!". And those things were said before the swag raffle :)
Anyway.. Stay tuned to the Ann Arbor day of .NET link above. Much of the material (including presentations, code samples, etc) will be available in the very near future.