On Friday evening I was lucky enough to be invited to attend the speaker's dinner for Powered By Detroit. It was a great evening, fantastic food and even better conversation with some of the most respected experts in the industry.
I found myself enjoying my meal with Danilo Celic , Lawrence Cramer , Angela Buraglia and Dan Short
The highlight of the dinner had to be my UG's unofficial co-manager, Kevin Phillips, explaining his latest project to the group. Of course, I twisted his arm to tell the others about it - but the entire table thought it was a very unique and interesting idea.
I ran into many other friends at the dinner too and got to briefly talk with Greg Rewis about his new phone and some of the fantastic Flash Apps that people are developing for mobile devices.
What a way to kick off a conference - I was geeked for the first day to arrive and sure 'nuff, it did.
The first session I attended was "CFC Crash Course - An Introduction to CF Components" given by Doug Hughes. It was a packed session with something for everyone from beginner to intermediate levels. I've used CFC's in my development in the past, but this session made beginner OOP concepts a bit clearer to me and will help me change the way I layout applications in the future. Great job Doug!
The second session I attended was Jason Michael Perry's - "Developing Rich Internet Applications with Flash Remoting" This session focused on using the Flash Remoting Connector to get data in and bound to components and to tell you the truth - I've always used actionscript to do this - but I think I may just try the connector to see if it can save me some time.
My third session was Matt Woodward's - "Flex your ColdFusion Muscles" which gave a quick view of just how easy Flex can be used as your rich experience interface to existing complex web applications.
The conference lunch was awesome. Seriously - it was buffet style, but the food was great!
Following lunch Greg Rewis gave a very energetic keynote presentation on "Rich Internet Experience" that was well received by all attendees. We even got some sneak peeks at what may be available in the next version of the Flash Player - in a word - "hot!"
After the keynote I attended Jeff Houser's - "Creating Flash Sound", which was a refreshing session that focused much more on how developer's can create their own sound effects and the best way to get them into Flash. There is definitely a place for this kind of session at these conferences - as many people I know focus way too much on grabbing free, lack luster sounds for their applications - when they could be making their own, higher quality sounds/music using programs such as Sound Forge / ACID.
I closed out the first day with Danilo Celic's - "sIFR: Flashy Fonts for the Web" which was fantastic because it allowed me to get an understanding of sIFR and how I could implement it on client sites to add a great feel of uniqueness to sites. Danilo is very cool and a great speaker, he explains things well and makes it look easy. Top notch!
After closing first day comments from Cornel, it was back home to Windsor and a quiet evening at home, testing out some of the many things I learned that day.
Day one grade - A+
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