We’re nearing the end of day 2 of Devscovery (I’m in the last lecture of the day now) and today has been quite a bit better than yesterday.

I spent the first half of today (two lectures’ worth) listening to John Robbins talk about debugging applications. That was really, really good. I learned quite a bit of useful information and some pretty keen tips and tricks that I’ll be able to use to make my daily work more productive. Even better than the fact I was psyched to learn that stuff was the fact that Robbins was on top of his presentation. The slides complemented what he was saying. Any time I felt like there was something I should write down I found that on the slide in the handout. Excellent demos, great information, interesting anecdotes - it doesn’t get better than that. We even got done with 15 minutes left at the end for questions.

The second half of the day has been spent in lectures about threading in applications. Some of that has been interesting, some of it has been boring. The speaker knows his stuff, but the guy just can’t stick to the schedule. Also, I don’t know if it’s just that the material is dry, or maybe if I’ve reached my limit for the day, but I’m sort of tuning in and out of this one.

At the end of the day, we’re going to get a chance to go buy stuff at the Microsoft company store. That’ll be good. Last time I was there I was able to get a few pretty cool shirts and some bargain software. Looking forward to that.

More annoyances about the structure of this thing: There are three major events going on at the same time in the same corridor in the convention center we’re at and there are enough people that, well, it’s confusing as hell. Everyone is dressed identically, there are identical tables of food running up and down the hallway, and the whole thing is pretty much chaos. Stu got told off when he was trying to get food because apparently that food wasn’t for us. What a load of shit. All the food is identical. I was offended.

Also, my wireless access here keeps getting dropped. I notice that it’s happening to the presenters’ machines, too, though Stu hasn’t been afflicted. Come on, though - dicey wireless?

More for the feedback form, I guess.

I think we’ll probably have dinner at Red Robin tonight. There’s one sort of close to the hotel, and I’m not much for trying out new food.