I just wanted to let everyone know about this very awesome and exciting event!

The Little Rock .NET Users Group did a tremendous job on Tech Expo 2006!

Doors opened at 7:00 am with vendor / sponsor booth's as well as an "Exhibitor Breakfast" sponsored by Idera. The very first presentation was the Expo Keynote presented by Jeffrey Richter on "Building Responsive and Scalable Applications". It was a most excellent presentation on when and why to use threads in our applications, so we can more effectively take advantage of today's multi-core CPU's and more! This was followed by the "Breakout Sessions" where the tough decisions had to be made! Choosing between 5 events at 10:00 then another 5 at 11:15. The following schedule is based on their original scheduled time, some presentations were shifted around because of delayed flights. Breakout Sessions 10:00
  1. VS Team System and Your Development Environment by David McKinstry
  2. Get RAD: Extending Visual Studio 2005 by Kevin McNeish
  3. Building Powerful Interfaces with WinForms and WPF by Markus Egger
  4. Provide User Customization for Web Sites Today with Web Web Parts by Keith Nicholson
  5. SQL: SQL Server Performance Turning - Introduction for Developers by Dimitry Frenkel
Breakout Sessions 11:15
  1. Managing Projects with VS 2005 Team System by Brian Moore
  2. Using and Abusing AJAX in ASP.NET 2.0 Applications - The New AJAX Application Framework Codenamed "Atlas" by Caleb Jenkins
  3. Introduction to LINQ by Markus Egger
  4. MM (Mere Mortals) .NET Application Framework by Kevin McNeish
  5. SQL: Building Secure, Reliable, and Scalable Database Systems with SQL Server 2005 by Peter DeBetta
An "Exhibitor Lunch" sponsored by Compuware at 12:15. Followed by two more sets of "Breakout Sessions" at 1:15 and 2:30, again 5 different choices at each time. Breakout Sessions 1:15
  1. Writing Quality Code with VS 2005 Team System by Russ McClelland
  2. Windows Forms 2.0 In-Depth by Kevin McNeish
  3. Introduction to Borland Developer Studio 2006 by Anders Ohlsson
  4. Introduction to Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 by Paul Ballard
  5. SQL: T-SQL Enhancements by Jerry Dixon
Breakout Sessions 2:30
  1. Understanding and Optimizing Performance with ADO.NET by Jonathan Bruce
  2. The Art of Refactoring in Visual Studio 2005 by Kevin McNeish
  3. Simplifying Integration Projects by Jason Bonds
  4. New Databinding Features for Smart Clients by Paul Ballard
  5. SQL: .NET Integration by Jerry Dixon
3:45 was the choice between: Developer Keynote - SOA: Procedural Programming Redux or Emergent Technology? by Rocky Lhotka or SQL: Database Versioning and Continuous Integration by Russ McClelland and Dimitry Frenkel. They were all so hard to pick from.

For the final speaker of course I chose Rocky and he delivered an awesome presentation at the end on SOA.

I put the $15 down to order the the DVD they are producing that will actually have the video recording of each and every session right beside the actual PPT slides! It was held at the University of Arkansas Little Rock and their multimedia students will be editing and publishing the dvd. For the grand prize at the end they were giving away Rolling Stones tickets for the concert that very night! All the prizes were given away during an excellent bbq dinner that was sponsored by Data Direct. Paul Ballard from Rochester Consulting gave a surprising MSDN Universal with Team System as an unexpected prize at the end as well!

The group did an excellent job and they've only been a group for just over 2 years now! I'm so looking forward to hosting our own Tech Expo!

I know it will be a lot of work, but it will be truely worth it!