>>March 1? Did this mispost?
>>
>>You will probably be disappointed in me that I passed on an opportunity to hear Mike Zwilling speak at the Dev Interactions conference in Orlando yesterday. I was tempted but stuck to the AngleBrackets track for the most part -- JavaScript, jQuery, and related JS libraries like Angular, Breeze, Bootstrap, and Gulp. Boy, does that stuff change fast. I am still new at it so it was like drinking water from a fire hose at times but I learned a lot. I did have the chance to see two living legends, Douglas Crockford and Ward Bell.
>>
>>One of the few "other" sessions I attended (apart from the keynotes, which were disappointingly skewed to Microsoft execs pushing Microsoft technologies -- they do that to you when you take their money to be a main conference sponsor) was one on "Stored Procedures Best Practices" by Kevin Kline. The database guy, not the actor ;-) Good stuff.
>
>No, no issue with the post date, I was just late posting it :)
>
>I think you should have attended Zwilling's talk, partly because the content of the other areas is more ubiquitous
>
>On the sessions that have too much sales promotion, that is an issue going beyond conferences and is now affecting community channels as well.
>
>Kevin Kline is very good. I now him a little (not well, just a few brief conversations). Yes, he's a definite blue-chipper

Content about client-side JS tools may be somewhat ubiquitous but Douglas Crockford and Ward Bell are not. If you are not too familiar with that world, this may give you some idea. At lunch the last day of the conference one of the developers at my table said he had been sent specifically to see Mike Zwilling speak on "SQL Server 2014: In-Memory OLTP Architecture and Capabilities." His boss told him I don't care what else you go to, just go to that one. Then he saw it was at the same time as Crockford's main keynote. (The SQL Server and SharePoint tracks were sort of off in their own world). He said there was no way I was going to miss that. I said whoa, just try to keep your boss from finding out. "Too late," he said. "I talked to him on the phone this morning and already told him." This guy was young and obviously bright and enthusiastic so I don't imagine he is in too much hot water.

Ward Bell is a wild child. He was the technical vision behind IdeaBlade and is now the author of Breeze, a JS library for data binding, queries, logging, and other functions. Unbeknownst to me, he was sitting on the floor about 5 feet away from me at a session by Brian Noyes, a Microsoft MVP and Regional Director. I wasn't sure but don't think Noyes knew in advance Bell was going to be in the audience. I definitely noticed Bell without knowing who he was. He was not dressed to go unnoticed, wearing a "Ma, Ma, where are the sunglasses?" shirt and shiny black pants. Then someone asked Brian a question about interfaces between Breeze and Angular, to which he said he thought there was one. Ward stood up and said that's in progress, with Knockout coming after that. He added a few more comments during the session and fielded some questions Brian bounced to him. It was funny at one point when someone asked whether some feature exists in Breeze. "Not that I know about," Ward said drily. I don't care what a guy dresses like if he is that knowledgeable and contributes that much to the developer community.

No, definitely not bashful --

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