Thanks Alex
The training angle is a good idea. That would appeal to State Agency ideas. If they can train 3 people for the price of one, great.

So far Ive got:
Pick sessions that relate directly to our current/future projects
Offer to give training sessions on return

One thing I did not see for sessions was something on the development environment. My boss makes use include all classes controls in each project. When we have some 100 plus projects at 2meg of space for all classes/controls used in development, its major bloat. She is adament against using a common class library for the programmers (all of 2). Don't even mention SourceSafe. she thinks it is way to complicated for our small? shop. I heard that it didn't play well with VFP 8. Our boss is beginning to sound like a dinosaur. Don't get me wrong, she lets us do our job without hovering or leaning. Its one of the best places I have worked. She just needs to come into the 21st century. Thats what makes it hard to come up with enough sell to get to go to conferences.


>>I am not really going at writing justification letters. My boss needs to justify to our Florida State agency how it will benefit our Administrative section. We write accounting/personnel applications. Would anyone have an idea where I could get an idea or have something they could share.
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>Some of this has already been pointed out, but I'd like to offer the selling points I use when getting approval from my boss (in a large corporation).
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>- find sessions that can be directly applied to currrent/near future projects (not difficult to do as there is some gray area here).
>- a promise to give one or two presentations to other in-house developers on new technologies learned at the conference has worked well for me.
>- lastly, networking is very important to me, though more difficult to sell. The discussion of ideas, and the opportunity to ask tough current-proyect questions to your peers has worked for me with the boss.
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>HTH