Wow, what a day!

The first ever WCF Firestarter event was yesterday at the New York City Microsoft offices and it was awesome.  The agenda was simple and to-the-point.

I started the day with the first two sessions, introducing everyone to WCF an then segueing them into more advanced binding and behavior configurations by showing the most commonly used configuration scenarios.  Seems that transaction handling was the more popular one there.  After lunch, one of our local DEs, Peter Laudati took the stage to talk about WCF REST capabilities.  After which, Don Demsak introduced everyone to WCF Data Services, rounding out the capability set of this technology.  I came back on at the end of the day to talk about the new WCF 4 stuff and it seems that routing capabilities was the highlight on that one.

  Peter and Don did an awesome job, as always.  As for my performance, I was happy but I’ll let others blog about what they thought.  All in all, I was comfortable with the outcome and I think the crowd was pleased.  We had about 200 attendees in the room and another 108 on LiveMeeting.  The event brought in people from around the country and world I think.  I put out a call for listeners to send me an email telling me where they are and immediately I received one from a listener in Southern Australia.  Kudos goes out to Coral who was listening in the middle of the night, down under.

When I took a poll at the beginning as to how many WCF users I had in the room, the count was extremely low (about 10) so I think this was definitely the target audience.

Thank you to Peter for getting Microsoft behind this event and for handling all the logistics, and thanks for letting me spearhead the agenda and content for the event.  I had a great time doing it.  O’Reilly was awesome and sent me 5 copies of Michele’s book and 5 of Juval’s to give away.  Also thanks to Developer Express and Telerik for donating product licenses for the event.  Both those companies can always be counted on to support these kind of events and their giveaways were the first ones to disappear.  Also, we had a tech out in Redmond with us every step of the way, monitoring the live feed and standing by in case of problems and we couldn’t have been more grateful to Erik Ostrowski for his help and for being there at 3am his time, to help us out.

As a goof, I have away a couple of “What Would Miguel Do?” t-shirts that a client of mine made for me.  I couldn’t believe it when one of the guys put it on and wore it for the entire event.  It was certainly flattering a very cool gesture.

I think that Danny, the DE down in the Philly market wants to put this event on in his territory so I guess that’s where we’ll be taking it next.

Thanks again to Microsoft, the local DEs, Don, and all the attendees and listener for help making it a great event.

Until next time…