WinDev 2004 is over, and so ends my first big conference I have either attended or presented. I had a great time this week meeting the other speakers, lots of people attending the talks, and learning many new things from the various tracks.
I spent most of my time in the Security track, which is where I gave my talks. I also went to some sessions in the database (SQL Server 2005) and CLR/C# tracks as those are also very interesting to me.
My talks, for the most part, went well. My timing could have been better, though, as both ended a little earlier. I made the mistake of using slides from two-three months ago because I thought I couldn't change or update them after they were submitted. Hindsight, I would have reworked them to be more comprehensive for both talks as well as more practical for the second talk (I had some comments on the evals that it was too advanced).
Highlights of WinDev for me were meeting and/or spending time for the first time with Keith Brown (actually met him last week at XML DevCon), John Lam, Dominick Baier, Bob Beauchemin, Brent Rector, David Cowles, Jason Whittington, Juval Lowry, Kit George, Peter Provost, and Mark Pearce. These are all people I greatly admire and respect. I also enjoyed seeing people I work with at my main client site as well as spending time with Ernie Booth (who has done a great job among others with the Beantowndotnet.org group).
I especially enjoyed dinner with Peter Provost and Mark Pearce on Thursday night. Mark says he visits the US on business often (he is from the UK) and I hope to meet with him again -- a very, very bright and engaging fellow. Peter impressed me immensely with his knowledge and use of Extreme Programming (of which I am big fan) as well as architecture and patterns. I hope to meet him at future conferences as well.
Peter caught the "Secure AppDomain" bug from my second talk and wants to apply it immediately to unit testing of Code Access Security (looking forward to the results!). Mark, Peter, and I attended Keith's session on Unit Testing Security where he put together the start of code changes to NUnit to do some CAS testing! Great stuff!
A very special thanks to Keith for the opportunity to speak at WinDev this year.