Prague DevCon, Day 2

I decided to skip Craig's COM+ sessions: I'd seen him present this topic before, he has excellent session notes, and I wanted to practice the two sessions I was doing that afternoon one last time. After doing so, and catching up on some email, I attended Alan's Introduction to LINQ session. LINQ is a lot further along that when I last looked at it, and it's very cool. I especially like the way you can query against anything IEnumerable, including arrays and collections, and that you can call functions and do just about anything in the query itself, just like you can with VFP.

After lunch (submarine sandwiches again), I presented my Mining for Gold in XSource session. In this session, I show how to reuse some of the components that come with VFP, such as a progress bar, object-oriented shortcut menu, and even a powerful but easy-to-use builder framework. I saw a lot of smiles when I showed how to create a useful builder in less than five minutes.

My second session, Cool Uses for ReportListeners, followed a short break. This is a fun session to present, because I show how to hyperlink reports, useful for things like drilldown reports, how to create a report preview window with a "live" surface (one that supports click and other events), and doing text search within a preview window. I got a lot more feedback from these two sessions than I did yesterday's, so hopefully they went over well with the audience.

That evening, the speakers took a bus, the metro, and a tram to a restaurant in downtown Prague (the TOP Hotel, where the conference is located, is quite a ways out of central Prague) owned by Derek, who is the majority owner in the company Igor works for. It's a brand-new restaurant (only open for two weeks) and is very nice. The restaurant was closed to the public for the night, so Derek, his son Adam, Liz, and the other staff devoted their time to just us. Figuring we were a group of geeks, Derek prepared a flowchart of the evening, including what would be served at each course and the drinks we were expected to consume. The food was fabulous -- I especially liked the toast with pieces of garlic you rub on them, as everyone who watched me pound back about 10 of them can attest. Of course, I wasn't the only one enjoying the food; Alan had several helpings of the thinly-sliced roast beef, including one after dessert! Adam, who's only 13 and had school the next day, was a waiter extraordinare. He was incredibly funny and a talented singer (he favored us with a couple of songs, including dancing). We left the restaurant after midnight and must have been a little noisy while waiting for our cabs, because someone dumped a bucket of what I hope was water from an upstairs window (fortunately, they just missed us).

Prague DevCon was a great conference. The sessions were top-notch, the food excellent, the conference staff wonderful, and Igor was an extremely gracious host. I can't wait until next year's conference!