Just got home from the airport; what a trip. I flew out Tuesday night on a red eye arriving at about 6:30 am in Toronto (On my way out I listened to the new altdotnet podcast this is great stuff!). I spent all of Wednesday in a barely-able-to-walk-because-I-was-so-tired state popping in and out of various sessions and hanging out with many of the great people at the conference.
Today I checked out a few sessions including Owen's continuous integration and Dave Laribee's Strategic Domain Driven Design (I took videos of my session and Dave's session and will be placing them up here in the next few days). I really wanted to see two of Oren's talks (DSLs and advanced DI but was unable to make either). I also wanted to see JP's DDD session but it was unfortunately scheduled at the same time as my talk so I was unable to make it.
On a side note I would really love it if at one of these conferences we could do a bunch of sessions like this one after another (or a pre/post con tutorial) to jump start people who are not familiar with the subject (drop me a line if something like a pre/post con tutorial would interest you as I am curious on the level of interest). As an example at devTeach we could have come close to this with some small schedule changes as the sessions could almost be seen in a progression of JP->Dave->Me with each session adding to the knowledge learned in the session before. If we were to add in another 2-3 sessions there could be a huge amount of effective knowledge transfer. Maybe I will look at following up on this idea for devTeach Montreal but there are actually 2 of these tracks coming up!
Unfortunately the two tracks are both in the same week in November :( One being Oredev in Sweden and the other being QCon SF. To be honest I don't know how Eric does it, it sounds insane to me to be presenting in Sweden and in SF within 2 days... You may notice that there is also an alt.net track listed for QCon ... cool stuff! QCon is the best/highest level conference I have ever been to, its will be great to have a good showing from the .NET community.
As always, the discussions outside of the sessions were great. When you get so many smart people in one place good things are bound to happen!
JR and crew did an great job (as always) with the conference. Setup was good, especially the ability to find power for my laptop. I heard there were problems with the wireless early in the conference but my experience with it was great.