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If you want information it's much faster to just look it up on the Web. These days just about everything is available on the internet (books, tutorials, white papers, etc).
Unless, of course you want to get off work for a few days and have a company-paid junket 
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Anonymous wrote:
If you want information it's much faster to just look it up on the Web.
Rubbish.
Although the web is certainly a good place to pick up information, there's always something new to be learned from a good speaker who knows what s/he's talking about.
Just last week we attended the MS Technical Roadshow in Edinburgh which gave us a few things to think about. We could have learned most of it from the Web, if we already knew what we were looking for, but the value of a conference is that it can give you a nudge that gets you out of your usual research rut by pointing out things you may not even have considered.
Conferences aren't always good, but you can't blanket condemn them either.
Gavin Greig
"Haw, you're no deid," girned Charon. "Get aff ma boat or ah'll report ye."
Matthew Fitt - The Hoose O Haivers: The Twelve Trauchles O Heracles.
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Gavin Greig wrote:
Just last week we attended the MS Technical Roadshow in Edinburgh which gave us a few things to think about
I agree, but don't you think that the speakers just raced through their subject. IMO, it would have been better if thay had extended each session to 90 minutes and they either had less topics or spread it over a third day. One of the guys that was doing an ASP.NET presentation was zipping through so fast that I gave up taking notes because I was writing one thing and before I'd finished I realised he was onto another area. Geez! If they have a sprint talking event at this summer's olympics I'm sure he'd get gold.
Gavin Greig wrote:
the value of a conference is that it can give you a nudge that gets you out of your usual research rut by pointing out things you may not even have considered.
Actually, the last TechEd I was able to attend (2001) I still refer to the post conference DVD because there was just so much information.
Also, like the ASP.NET Controls talk last week at the roadshow, I already knew most of the subject (I picked it as a filler because nothing in the other two tracks at the time was relevant to me) but there was one or two little titbits that were quite useful. Things I didn't already know, or hadn't thought about.
Gavin Greig wrote:
Conferences aren't always good
I was at a conference a couple of years back where all the speakers just got up and said, we had this problem and we used [insert name of vendor's software] and everything was rosy. They reeled off a bunch of statistics about their company's customer base, assets, database size, etc. but gave nothing really useful at all.
"You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want." --Zig Ziglar
The Second EuroCPian Event will be in Brussels on the 4th of September
Can't manage to P/Invoke that Win32 API in .NET? Why not do interop the wiki way!
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Colin Angus Mackay wrote:
I agree, but don't you think that the speakers just raced through their subject.
Yes. On the other hand, they managed to cover a lot of ground, and the sessions were short enough that a shot of coffee between sessions mostly kept me awake - darkened presentation rooms, especially after an early start to get there from St. Andrews, are not good for keeping the eyes open and the brain alert.
Having been to quite a lot of these things in the older format, which did have less sessions and longer presentations, I think I prefer the new format, though maybe not by a large margin.
I was particularly pleased by last week's sessions, not so much for myself as for my colleagues. One had been to a couple of roadshows some years ago and wasn't impressed, while another hadn't been to any before. Both came away favourably impressed from this one and eager for the chance to apply what they'd learned. Microsoft visibly respond to the feedback they get, and the roadshows have got better over time.
I'm afraid I haven't been to any "pay to attend" conferences, but I'm trying now to plant the idea of TechEd attendance in future years.
Gavin Greig
"Haw, you're no deid," girned Charon. "Get aff ma boat or ah'll report ye."
Matthew Fitt - The Hoose O Haivers: The Twelve Trauchles O Heracles.
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Anonymous wrote:
If you want information it's much faster to just look it up on the Web
It is not about getting information faster. It is about getting information you may not have thought to look for because you may not have known it existed.
Anonymous wrote:
Unless, of course you want to get off work for a few days and have a company-paid junket
If that is the way you look at it then you are missing an opportunity to learn and expand you knowledge. Like I mentioned in another branch of this thread, even the session on ASP.NET controls, which I have already worked with, provided a couple of interesting titbits of information I hadn't thought about.
"You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want." --Zig Ziglar
The Second EuroCPian Event will be in Brussels on the 4th of September
Can't manage to P/Invoke that Win32 API in .NET? Why not do interop the wiki way!
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I never go to them, though many people in my company do to TechEd. I never see the people coming back with good ideas, or anything useful, apart from the t-shirts. Though, I suppose you have a point. The only way I would consider going to one is if the conference was cheap and close to where I work and there was a chance to talk to people with experience in the area that I'm interested in.
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Anonymous wrote:
though many people in my company do to TechEd. I never see the people coming back with good ideas, or anything useful
Sounds like it is wasted on them. I felt it was like a direct information injection.
"You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want." --Zig Ziglar
The Second EuroCPian Event will be in Brussels on the 4th of September
Can't manage to P/Invoke that Win32 API in .NET? Why not do interop the wiki way!
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A week out of the office
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