Last conference for awhile...

I got a chance to speak about Silverlight at the TechReady conference this week (same talk I gave at MIX), I love to talk about Silverlight and it's always great to talk with people who are in the trenches using or thinking about using your stuff. TechReady is an interesting conference, it's like TechEd except with all-Microsoft attendees and a few talks thrown in on subjects like "Linux compete" and "selling SQL Server". It's mostly intended for "the field" -- i.e., people not in product development, such as support, consulting, evangelism, etc. Fairly impressive scale, too, there were several thousand attendees and we had the entire Seattle Convention Center.

The conference also marked a personal milestone for me, I've now spoken at every major Microsoft conference (or at least, every conference that's major to my line of work) -- PDC, TechEd, MIX, WinHEC, even gave a talk once at Driver DevCon. I'm not a real outgoing person, but I enjoy giving these talks, I like honing the presentation skills and putting together a good presentation forces you to see things from another perspective. I also get a lot more out of conferences when I'm a speaker, since more people come up to me to talk.

As much as I like the conferences, though, I'm glad I don't have any on my calendar for a while. They take a lot of time to prepare, and every now and then I'd like to work on Silverlight as well as talk about it. <g> It's also been pretty busy year for me, between business & pleasure I've been on the road roughly once a month since December. I like to travel but it takes a toll, I'm really looking forward to sleeping in the same bed for the next couple weeks.