Although I'm still not home yet I flew the red eye back from Vegas Thursday night just in time to head down to Hilton Head with the wife for a few days (working vacation unfortunately). This was my first conference in several years. In years previous (including last years TechEd and DevConnections) I had always booked them well in advance but needy clients always lead me to canceling or selling my tickets at the last minute.. DevConnections Vegas 2007 reminded me of all the things I love and hate about conferences. 

I headed out Sunday night with the whole B&R Business Solutions crew including Chris Regan, Jay Medero, Bob Fox, Michael Lotter, and the rest of the crew (see picture below). The night started out with a great dinner courtesy of B&R where I had the pleasure of meeting up with several SharePoint MVPs that I hadn't met before including Andrew Connell, Heather Solomon, Dan Attis, and Brendan Shwarts just to name a few. Hell it was great to meet and chat with 80% of my Sharepoint blog roll while I was there. It was nice to finally meet Brendan as I had done some work with INETA a while back and more recently assisting him on a small side project of one of the Atlanta area MS Developer Evangelists but I had yet to meet him in person. Its funny how that happens quite a bit. The conference speakers were outstanding with Andrew's definitely topping off my list of favorites. We are both on the same kick pushing the use of SharePoint as a application platform. Lots of great content there. It was also nice to see some Raleigh locals there including Rob Zelt.

Although the facilities were great (hell its Vegas) I wasn't really happy with the logistics of the event. Over half of my SharePoint sessions I attended were overcrowded and ran out of room which led to standing room only in the back. There was little to drink in between sessions except for some tap water in coolers that tasted like crud and the food was hit\miss. Pretty much status quo for conferences but it would have been nice to see some better planning on the rooms, maybe some non-binding Teched like sessions signups so they could gauge attendance.

I never did hit the casinos. Gambling never was my thing. I almost considered it after chatting with AC (Andrew Connell) and he was talking about his winnings (I think he hit close to $4000!!) but in the end I have no clue about how to play most of the table games that might interest me (pulling a lever every 10 seconds for hours on end does nothing for me lol) and I don't think being clueless on card games is a good recipe for any kind of success, now if they had some Halo tournaments that would be a different story.... I do have to say I have to thank my friend\coworker Jay and Chris for my introducing me to Kettle Vodka and Red Bull. a very very dangerous combination that I can attest to.

All in all I went to DevConnections to meet some folks and catch a few good technical sessions and I wasn't disappointed . Now its time to start planning for Sharepoint Conference 2008 in March.