Las Vegas was cool. I finally found some time to post again to the blog after returning from Las Vegas at the VS Live! conference. With six weeks of school remaining for me, I am beginning to taste the freedom I once had before this program commenced twenty-one months ago. In my organization, a team of ten software engineers were given the opportunity to travel to Las Vegas to attend the VS Live! conference. I was lucky enough to be among them.

At VS Live! there were two tracks, ASP Live! and SmartClient Live! I spent much of my time immersed in the former, as many of my interests lie in web development. The duration of the conference was four days, where days one and four were day-long workshops, and days two and three were broken down into six sessions. Each session was lead by an instructor of notable recognition in the world of software engineering. I found their expertise and presentations to be helpful and motivating. It would be difficult for me to choose one session that I enjoyed most, because I feel like I took something from each one. I did wind up ordering three new books to read a recommended by instructors, as well as implement some new techniques on asynchronous threading and caching. My next step is to port the ASP.NET 2.0 master pages to 1.1. I hear there is a community project out there that offers this.

This was my first time in Las Vegas. It is different than what I anticipated. I wound up on the positive side of gambling earnings. What shocked me most is that at seven in the morning, people are still drinking and gambling as if time stands still. Good for them.

The sooner I can complete school, the more time I will have to dedicate to the fun stuff I saw at the conference, like experiencing the ASP.NET and ADO.NET 2.0 synergy.