The Heartland Developers Conference was held in Omaha, NE this year. This was my first year attending and I have to say it was a great experience. There were sneak peaks into new stuff Microsoft will be releasing soon such as MVC4 and Visual Studio 2011. I'm sure I'll blog about some of these things once they're released. There were also quite a bit of presentations related to proper UI design and looking at applications through the eyes of a user. One really good example they gave was how LinkedIn gives you a score based on how complete your profile is. This gives the user an indication of how much they have left to do and actually motivates the user to use your site more. There were also a few presentations related to jQuery and RESTful services. I attended the OpenRasta jQuery hands-on lab but had to leave early due to a production issue at work.
If there's no other reason to attend HDC next year do it for the networking opportunities. I met countless professionals, entrepreneurs and recruiters including Scott Hanselman from Microsoft. I actually got to sit down and have lunch with him at Burger King of all places. We talked a bit about how to ignite a bit of passion into the .NET community and encourage more developer involvement. It's interesting that the .NET community is so large yet there aren't nearly as many bloggers as other languages/technologies. This is a call out to those reading this! Here's a pic I took of Scott and I right after HDC ended (I'm on the left).
After watching Scott present at HDC I was convinced he should be a standup comic. His presentations were very informative but at the same time entertaining and comical. I didn't realize until later that he actually failed as a comic in the past.
Something else that was nice was getting announced over the PA as being the second place winner in the Rubiks Challenge. I thought it was cool just being announced at first but I've actually gotten some emails from recruiters and others who recognized me. Being known for out-coding other developers is something no amount of $ can equal. I also got to meet a lot of local .NET developers and I can probably name at least one person from any local company with a .NET shop. Overall I would definately recommend HDC to any programmers out there trying to learn more and become a part of the .NET community.
Tags: HDC, Heartland, Conference