I just want to post a few closing thoughts about Advisor DevCon. (I am writing this on the flight home)
The Advisor organizers did a great job onsite and were very helpful in answering my questions. Being a rookie speaker at the conference, you never know exactly how things will go. The folks were helpful. A special call out to Heather who was kind enough to stop by my sessions and give me the “five minute” warning. Nice touch.
The conference hotel was very nice and the facilities were outstanding. The prices for the food were a bit pricey, but as far as Advisor “resort” location, this one was as cheap as they have come. There was a nice selection of restaurants at a nearby mall and I enjoyed many good meals with friends. My only gripe about the hotel was the fact they wanted to charge me US$10 a day for Internet connection in the room. Advisor provided lots of connections for us to use in the conference meeting area so I used those instead. I stay in less expensive hotels all the time and they have wireless or wired for *FREE*, as it should be. Resorts trying to stiff me for this is ridiculous, but I digress.
The lack of a speaker dinner did not bother me. In fact, I like hanging out with speakers and attendees for dinner and lunch so this meant I got one more meal to share with all my friends. While the dinner is a nice gesture to say thanks to the speakers, I am thinking these should become an artifact of past conferences, or done before or after the conference. I did not miss it at GLGDW 2006 and did not miss it here.
Arizona in August was not something I was honestly looking forward to, but it really is a dry heat with lots of air conditioning indoors. The timing of the conference was not something I appreciated with my son moving back to college and missing the last week my girls are off school. But it all worked out. Next year I hope the coordinate with the other conferences to provide better timing and better value to the Fox Community.
In my original post about the first day of the conference I mentioned there were probably 100-120 people. This was an unofficial estimate based on the attendance of Alan’s Keynote and figuring some people were not attending the 8:00am session. I attended many sessions and did some unofficial counting. On average there were maybe 70 people in attendance of both sessions. Maybe the VFP attendees were hanging out in the other tracks, but I am guessing there were less than 100 VFP attendees at this conference. Unfortunate.
There were only three VFP vendors at DevCon (Stonefield, DBi Tech, and Micromega). I know the reason is pure economics. I would have to sell 20 White Light Computing tool bundles at full price to break even and I have never sold even close to that at any conference. I applaud those who made the effort though. I also hope they all sold a bunch of licenses and it was worth their time and expense. It was good seeing the guys from DBi and look forward to the DBi bucks they are offering at Southwest Fox in October. Great supporters of the Fox Community.
One huge take-away from the conference was the CD-ROM with all the white papers. I started reviewing some of these on the way home. A big thanks to the speakers who worked hard on these!
Second big take-away is the discovery of the Strataframe Database Deployment Toolkit. I have been looking for the equivalent to the Stonefield Database Toolkit for SQL Server. Last night at dinner Doug Hennig mentioned this product to me. This is something I am going to look into next week when I get some time after catching up on all the work I delay this week while I was having a bunch of fun at a conference.
OK, that is all for the Advisor Summit. Time to wrap up preparations for my Southwest Fox sessions. For those that have it, have a great Labor or Labour Day weekend. I for one am getting a head start tomorrow.
Rick,
Thanks for your reporting on DevCon. I couldn’t make it this year but it was fun to read about. Thanks again.
I just wanted to say thanks, too. Very interesting.
We just purchased a Strataframe framework license, the VFE of .NET in my opinion (may get more if it works out well on our first project). We opted not to get their Database Toolkit, though, as our deployments and schema changes are attended over VPN so we just use EM, DTS, scripts, SQL Compare, etc. But yeah, if you have an app that you want to have users install or want to let someone else perform updates, this will package things up nicely. I learned there are other uses for the database toolkit such as modeling datasets for XML as backend, etc. so we may wind up getting it at some point.