Last night’s Grok talks were a smashing hit! I was so happy with how everything went off. We had:
Jason Follas speaking on T-SQL Enhancements in Sql Server 2005 SQL CLR (Turns out Jason reads my blog and corrected me… :)). Jason is one of the local experts on SQL Server 2005 and ran through a quick preview of what his talk is going to be on at Day of .NET.
John Hopkins speaking on ADO.NET Table Adapters. He showed how much code you could save with careful use of the table adapters. It’s amazing how little control you are giving up for that much power.
Darrell Hawley speaking on role based authentication for web services. It was impressive that he got through that much code in that little time. He showed how to secure the web service with roles so that you could have no access, view access, edit access or add item access. All of this is very close to reality so it was, in addition to being entertaining, was very practical.
Bill Wagner talking about C# 3.0. As always, I learned something new when listening to Bill talk. He talked about the var keyword in C# 3.0 and explained how it’s actually a strongly type keyword, it’s just that the type is not known until compile time.
Aydin Akcasu talking about Kids Programming Language. This was a preview to his talk at Day of .NET. It was an exciting talk that got me excited about the possibilities that I could have with my son programming.
Martin Shoemaker talking about building speech and ink applications for the tablet. This was an interesting talk because Martin didn’t talk the whole time – his tablet did all the talking. While he didn’t show as much code as he might have in a traditional talk, he showed what was really possible.
Josh Holmes (me) talking about the ASP.NET 2.0 – Health Monitoring. I also MC’d the whole deal. That was fun! It was also a treat – I came in on time because I had a lot of people timing me that were under strict orders to pull the hook if I went over.
And finally
Carl Franklin of .NET Rocks talking about remote podcasting. This was fun because he was remote. He was tied into the PA system through a phone connection and VNC’d into Bill Wagner’s laptop so that he could do his presentation. There were a ton of moving parts, but it all went rather smoothly.
I’m hoping that we will repeat the Grok talk idea really soon. It was a ton of fun and the audience seemed to get a lot out of it.