(Ok, so to preface this post, I don’t just attend conferences. It’s just that my company was gracious enough to send me to two conferences almost back to back and there’s always something cool to talk about when attending conferences.)

Well, the first day of DevConnections 2007 is almost over… and, in my opinion, it’s been a little underwhelming. Sure, there’s been swag up the wazoo, and the news that I’d be getting a free copy of Visual Studio 2008 just for attending didn’t hurt one bit… but the sessions so far have just not had a lot of substance or spectacle.

I take that back. The sessions I’ve been to have not had much substance or spectacle. But I’ve been almost exclusively listening to stuff over Visual Studio Team System 2008, and it has been mostly a recycling of the same material through each of the sessions, passed on to different speakers. Somebody should have just copy-and-pasted the session abstract information from one of the four sessions so that I could have realized this earlier and better spent my time (and my company’s money) attending sessions on other topics. Instead, the speakers probably gave the abstracts to some sales and marketing guys who made them sound super-intriguing (and unique) only to rope you into the session to hear the speakers yell “Gotcha!”

I will say the keynote over Visual Studio 2008 by Scott Guthrie was pretty cool. While a majority of the slides were over the same material he covered at the HDC last month, he did have some other Microsoft Product Managers come out and give some pretty nice demos. I especially enjoyed the one showing how you could use a Visual Studio add-in to create a plug-in for World of WarCraft to determine whether or not taking on an opponent in the game would result in their death or your own… Even though I don’t play the game myself, I thought the demo itself was frickin’ sweet!

Well, the first day is over, and I’m headed out to enjoy some Las Vegas nightlife (nothing too crazy). Let’s hope that Day 2 has a little more to offer.