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DavidWalker
Posts:5
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| 10/15/2006 11:17 PM |
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Thank you for your attendance at Tulsa Tech Fest 2006!
We had an amazing turn out and would love to hear your final comments on the event. Please take a few moments of your time to post your comments in this thread.
Please keep in mind that due to this being a public forum your comments may be used for future advertising and overall bragging about our awesome event  .
Thank you! |
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DavidWalker
Posts:5
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| 10/16/2006 2:48 AM |
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Sadly, I was so busy running the event that I was only able to attend 2 partial sessions.
After getting things calmed down during registration, getting the speakers comfortable in the Green Room and making sure the vendors and exhibitors had everything they needed, it was time to make the welcoming announcements.
Then I had the honor of introducing our first keynote speaker the world renowned Markus Egger presenting on the Next-Generation Applications on the Microsoft Platform, fresh of the stage of Nashville's also tremendously successful devLink.net Technical Conference.
I then ran across the campus just in time to introduce the first speaker on our Enterprise Architecture track Chip Wilson, one of only less than 100 Microsoft Certified Architects IN THE WORLD, presenting Using Capability Modeling to Facilitate SOA Adoption.
Finally, a first break for us event staff to get things even better under control while all the attendees were getting extremely valuable training.
At our next session time slot, I was able to introduce the very first person to agree to present at Tulsa Tech Fest 2006, the prestigious Ron Jacobs, Architect Evangelist in Microsoft's Architecture Strategy Team, where he presented Patterns and Anti-Patterns for Service-Oriented Architectures, He replied within 24 hours of asking!
Then it was back to the other side of the campus just in time to introduce the second keynote presentation. I was extremely eager and honored to introduce Shaun Walker presenting DotNetNuke® – Beyond the Code. During which time, we had our only empty session slot out of 120 planned sessions, where we acknowledged the fact that no DotNetNuke session could compete with his. To our knowledge, Tulsa Tech Fest 2006 was the only conference to give a full solid track to the extremely popular open source application framework that he has created and managed from it's humble beginnings.
Time to make the rounds making sure everyone was ready for the lunch rush, where thanks to Idera, Developer Express and Infragistics, we were able to offer everyone their choice of Subway, Domino's Pizza and hamburgers prepared by Hasty Bake. It was perfect weather for a cook out and the campus provided an excellent foyer to do so.
Then on to introduce Ron Jacob's awesome keynote presentation What Do Architects Do Anyway?
Regrettably, I was a few seconds too late to introduce Rob Pierry's Enterprise Architecture track presentation Managing Architectural Complexity.
I then introduced Chip Wilson's keynote presentation The Microsoft Certified Architect – Who, What, and How.
Sadly, I was unable to introduce the esteemed Mark Miller's presentation The Science of Great UI, because I had to get to my presentation Introduction to Programming Windows Communication Foundation.
Therefore, I was also just a few seconds short of introducing the much anticipated presentation by Carl Franklin from .NET ROCKS! He literally ROCKED THE HOUSE! with his presentation What a Long Strange Trip its Been. Where I had the honor of being included in his tremendously hilarius presentation. What a way to close the event! If he hasn't already, he should be recording an album, he is such a talented musician and singer! Evident by the closing songs he superbly played for all, including an encore of at least two original songs.
It was then time to give away the 50 - 100 books graciously donated by too many publishers to list (see the website), plus thousands of dollars in software and hugely anticipated drawings for two iPod's, Sirius Radio with year subscription and the grand prize XBOX 360.
In closing, it was time for the VIP Dinner where those who stuck around the longest were invited to join, for catered BBQ and the opportunity to rub shoulders with all the available speakers, including, but not limited to, Shaun Walker, Carl Franklin, Richard Campbell, Mark Miller, and so many more that with my sleep deprived mind cannot continue to list. Be sure to listen for the upcoming .NET Rocks! interviews Carl and Richard conducted.
There's many photos already published on www.theagencyblog.com. Keeping watching, because that's where we'll be posting all the video footage we were able to record.
We're still tabulating the survey results from the event, but it's very obvious that everyone agrees, all the
presenters did an excellent job!
Share your Tulsa Tech Fest 2006 experiences here with the rest of us as well!
Thank you to all for making the event a huge success!
Be sure to share your links to any blog and/or news posts about the event so we can include them on our In The Press page!
Sincerely,
David Walker
director@tulsatechfest.com |
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smehaffie
Posts:1
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| 10/16/2006 10:57 AM |
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Overall this was a great technical conference and all those involved in putting this together deserve a round of applause. Now for some specifics:
Good
1) All the seminars I attended were very good and the speakers were well prepared. There was also a good selection of beginner, intemediate and advanced topics.
2) Lunch was excellent (attendees had the choice between Sub-way, Dominos Pizza or grilled burgers). This was a lot better than the "box lunches" you usually get at these types of things.
3) The use of tickets and allowing users to select which prizes they wanted to try to win was a great way to do it. This is the first conference I have been to that has done that, but talking to other this appears to becoming the popluar way to do it.
4) Prizes were also great and the conference has a lot of great sponsors.
5) The location at the downtown OSU campus was very nice, and close to the hotel (3-5 minute drive).
Could Be Improved
1) There were to many presenters for one day. Hopefully this will be a 2 day event next year.
- It was hard to choose which session to go to each hour, there were to many to choose from.
- Spread out the attendees to much and caused some presenters attendance to be very low (1-5 people). As a presetner I have a feeling it was disheartening to put on a presentation to that small amount of attendees.
2) There really was not a lot of time between sessions to visit the vendor area. Might want to either give more time between sessions or designate a time before or after luch/show.
3) The hotel was not the best, but it was not the worst I have stayed in. I know that there was another conference in town that had booked all the hotels so options were limited. As long as you did not eat in the hotel restarant is was not that bad :-). Hopefully next year the hotel(s) will be booked earlier.
Summary
Although there were some things that could have been better, this was an awesoms show and I have already decided to attend next year. I you live within a 6-8 hour drive of Tulsa it is definately worth the road-trip, and I would highly recommend this conference.
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rburger
Posts:1
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| 10/16/2006 3:46 PM |
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I would have to echo those comments. My main comment is to offer a hearty thank you to everyone involved in putting this together. I rarely have the opportunity to take "paid-for" training and I have not seen a free training event of this caliber before. It was very well worth the drive from Fort Worth. Admittedly I debated making the trip until almost the last minute. That won't be the case next time. My only regrets were not being able to attend more sessions at once. I had to pass on many that I wanted to see, such as the DotNetNuke sessions, because I have a better understanding of it, in favor of things I need to know more. My only complaint, and a very small one at that, was that diet soft drinks seemed to be very hard to come by. But hey, I've got quarters!
Thanks to much to all of you that worked so hard on this. Excellent job.
Robert Burger
Information Systems Manager
Community Supervision and Corrections Department of Tarrant County, Texas |
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rdieter
Posts:3
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| 10/16/2006 6:01 PM |
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The event was far beyond my already large expectations. I enjoyed meeting Shaun Walker in person. It was very apparent that he had a complete view of the business aspects of the DotNetNuke program as well as the technical aspects. I believe that, with the advent of the corporation, DNN's future is especially bright.
Developing a robust web site in the real world is a particularly daunting task for even the most qualified developer. Having a reliable framework upon which to base one's web endevours is one of the most important aspect of making the web truely available to all. I believe that DNN is a prominant part of that evolution.
Many thanks, Shaun.
Robert Dieter
rdieter@embedtech.com
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