Saturday marked a big day for me - my return to some small amount of normality. With Nathan safely at the grandparents, James and I headed over to Reading for the WebDD conference hosted at Microsoft. I spent the morning with a big grin on my face while watching a talk on Expression Web - a very neat tool, and possibly the best tool so far for playing with css - I'm definitely looking forward to playing with that once I can get my laptop to behave! Also popped in and watched a fantastic talk on accessibility by an old friend of mine from the Wrox days, Bruce Lawson. Bruce is quite the guru in the field, and did a fantastic job of presenting an honest and interesting perspective on accessibility, and the problems faced by so many people when browsing and using the web. The next session on my list was Scott Guthrie's talk on Orcas, the next edition of Visual Studio, though the news spread that, due to extremely popular demand, he would kindly re-run it over lunchtime, so I popped upstairs to see the talk on Expression Blend. I'm no graphical genius, but even I reckon I could put together some fun stuff using that tool! (provided I can get it to work - poor Jon Harris's laptop was blown up by Dave, which made things a little awkward, but from what I could tell, it looked fantastic.
Lunch was a hurried affair as we struggled to throw down some food before we could go into Scott's re-run of the Orcas talk. And a very nice lunch it was too, even if Dave managed to catch me completely unexpectedly with his camera! He's lucky I'm still in a good mood from having had the day off baby duty ;)
So yeah, Orcas really does rock - incorporating the neat stuff from Expression Web and adding stuff like intellisense for Javascript (yes, really!) it's going to be great to get hold of that one. And it was great to see Scott enthusing so much about the product - he's one of those presenters who is always a joy to watch because you just know he loves what he does. Shame, then, that the next talk wasn't quite as enthralling - I went to the Ajax talk and I don't think I was alone in finding it a tough one to sit through. It's not the easiest of topics to present on, given the amount of javascript involved, but straight after lunch and Scott's talk I was a bit knackered. Anyway, there was another talk from Scott to enjoy later, as he gave a tour of the ultra-cool WPF/e - I am so looking forward to getting hold of Blend so I can really play with that particular tool! As an example of what it could do, Scott pointed us towards a very mad mock-up of Vista, which is very impressive!
After all the fun of the day, we headed in to Reading for drinks and pizza (mine was cheese-free!), which was a fun way to spend an evening. Thanks to Dave and friends for organising the whole thing, as it was a great day out, and well worth the drive!