Microsoft Israel .NET Deep Dive Developer Day

Yesterday we broke a new record for a single-day Microsoft developer event in Israel.  It was tagged .NET Deep Dive  and consisted of 2 parallel tracks: (1) Practices and Utilities and (2) Hardcore Programming, preceeded by a keynote on some new Team System features of VS2005.  What was amazing was the number of attendes that showed up - over 1,600 !!  

I did a presentation on .NET Worst Practices, focussing on common coding errors and issues. It was particularly fun for me, since (despite my VB passion) I did half of the content/demos in VB and half in C#.  Also, although I usually spend most of my time running around the world talking about new/future MS tools and technologies, it was very refreshing and appealing to attendees to talk only about shipping technologies (with only 2 or 3 minor references to .NET 2.0).

I have been involved in organizing and speaking at MS Israel events, as I was for this one, for almost 8 years - ever since I was responsible for running the first Developer Days event in Israel in 1997.   For that event, we were thrilled to have gotten 700 attendees - today that number would probably be considered a failure.  Over the years MS Israel has really learned how to do these events "in their sleep", although there is clearly a ton of logistial and organizational work required to make them happen.  

I really think that yesterday's event reached a new high, not only in terms of pure numbers, but also in attendee satisfaction.  Except for the opening keynote on VS2005, all of the other 8 sessions only addressed real-world issues with currently shipping products and technologies.   I think people really enjoyed these sessions that were clearly much more technical than marketing.  The afternoon sessions seemed to be particularly strong as indicated by the fact that the vast majority of the attendees stayed until the end of the day, which is not usually the case for a free event like this.