That sounds a lot better
Maybe next year there will be some ALT.NET stuff there:)

Oh, and one more thing — I did get interviewed (twice, actually) by a reporter covering the conference from Redmond Developer News about my reaction to the OSLO initiative, the Vote-of-no-confidence on the Entity Framework, and the goals of ALT.NET in general in trying to influence the direction of MS DevDiv in a positive way.

I think I gave the poor guy quite an earful for about 20 minutes there

Sure; I learned…

1) Silverlight 2 has a long way to go before its a viable replacement for ASP.NET Ajax on the client-side (decidedly NOT its mission, so not really a big deal there, though I strongly suspect that many a developer will try to stick the round peg that is Silverlight 2 into the square hole that is an inside-the-firewall corporate data-bound app)

2) Rocky’s talk on databinding to objects was pretty informative (not the basics, but some of the details re: work-arounds for little shortcomings of the .NET databinding infrastructure were very valuable as was his comparison of the binding API in ASP.NET, winforms, WPF, and WPF/e — oops, I mean Silverlight!)

3) The SQL Server 2008 beyond-relational talk was my first exposure to the FILESTREAM data type in SQL 2008 and seeing it exercised and understanding its nuances was very valuable to me (since we routinely fight the BLOB-in-the-database-vs-the-path-to-file-item-on-disk fight in a lot of our applications)

4) The talk of GeoRSS was very interesting — I hadn’t any awareness that it was even possible to geocode items in an RSS feed and since we do so much geospatial work, this is a tool that may be of use in my arsenal for the future

5) I learned that there are so many .NET developers with little or no understanding of the challenges, issues, etc. around ORM that the Entity Framework isn’t going to see widespread effective adoption for some time to come

Re: why there wasn’t an ALT.NET talk, I think its because I probably would have been having it with myself since there didn’t seem to be anything approaching a critical mass of agile-leaning people at the conference. The ‘birds-of-a-feather’ lunch table marked “ASP.NET MVC” (by my judgement, the topic most likely to attract ALT.NETters) was occupied by people at least *interested* in ASP.NET MVC but largely without even having downloaded the preview bits yet, so discussion on such topics was necessarily limited to high-level concepts rather than lower-level details.

In short: this was a MS-focused conference on MS-centric development philosophies and practices where there likley would have been minimal traction for the ALT.NET principles. As such, it made for a good place to get technology-centric information and details, but a poor place for spirited discussion about HOW to leverage any of these technologies.

Why didn’t they have an ALT.NET talk.