Posted by Will on Tuesday, November 11, 2008 at 2:26 AM

longhall

You know you're in Vegas when you pass a guy getting onto the elevator who is carrying an open bottle of beer...on your way to breakfast.

I made it to DevConnections.  I had a flight delay that lengthened my layover in Atlanta yesterday by a couple of hours.  The Mandalay Bay is an impressive hotel.  To give you a sense of scale I took the above image standing by the elevators.  That black dot is a person standing not quite at the far end of the hall.  There are three identical halls radiating out from the central room in the foreground.  My room is bigger than my living room at home, and the bathroom is larger than either of the kids' rooms.  It's a big place.

I started the day with a run north on the Las Vegas strip.  That took me past all of the famous casinos including The Mirage, The Excalibur (think Cable Guy with Jim Carey),  The Bellagio (think Ocean's Eleven), the MGM Grand, and The New York New York among others.  The New York New York has a roller coaster on top that I think Gil in C.S.I. rides in a few of the episodes.  I covered a about six and a half miles.  Back at the hotel I cleaned up and grabbed a bite before heading to the SilverLight pre-conference session given by Dan Wahlin.  It was a good session and I learned a lot.  Wahlin clearly knows his stuff.  As I said before, I've played around with SilverLight some, but not enough to have a good coherent picture.  I feel like I've got one now.  So far so good.  The main sessions start tomorrow. 

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Posted by Will on Wednesday, November 05, 2008 at 9:03 PM

mandalaysatellite I'm headed to the Fall 2008 DevConnections next week.  I attended DevConnections in the Spring of 2005 in Orlando and learned a lot.  I'll be spending most of my time on the ASP.NET track, although there are a few Visual Studio and SQL Server sessions I'm going to catch.  As usual, the schedule has a couple of sessions where I'd like to be two or three places at once, but I'm not complaining.  I'm also going to take in the Silverlight 2 pre-conference workshop.  I'm looking forward to a comprehensive primer.  I've played around some with Silverlight, but my approach has been so haphazard that I'm basically still on square one.  I'll be blogging and Twittering along the way with all the standard, cliche pictures of the sites of Vegas.



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