I was able to attend VSLive in San Francisco this year including the Pre-Conference (yes nifty indeed) hosted at the historical Fairmont.

Here are some of my notes/observations/snotty comments:

• Open source licenses are complicated and if you have deliverables in the enterprise you should NOT use copyleft licenses as you are legally bound to re-release under that same license your additions on top or using the original copyleft material. Focus on more Permissive licenses (like Apache, BSD, MIT) to avoid potential hassles.
• Microsoft really, REALLY loves Azure and wants you to 100% do everything in it. It was communicated that their reasoning for Open sourcing .NET was to promote “Any Developer, Any App on Any Device” – of course all using Azure offerings.
• PowerShell was a reoccurring theme across sessions from deployments to testing.
• San Francisco is a wickedly expensive place to visit. When the locals say “oh its only four blocks” be warned those four blocks are likely at 45° inclines and are meant to weed out the weak.
• It appears to me that most of the attendees don’t keep up during the year and use these conferences to catch up. My personal reason was to re-enforce that what I have learned and practiced on the technologies covered are correct and optimal. I can honestly say that about 80% of the material covered was review.
• I think its interesting how most developer types are very anti-social and these conferences continually try to “socialize” these sorts together. What winds up happening more often than not is groups of geeks sitting at a lunch table not a single person saying anything; absolute awkward silence. I attempt start up conversations and they usually end with a single “yep” or “nope” type response.

Notable Quotes from Sessions:

• “Trading velocity for quality will lead to technical debt” – Hundhausen
• “Routinely have a HARD Conversation with shareholders – Honest, Appropriate, Respectful and Direct” – Hundhausen
• “Always follow the Boy Scout Rule; leave your code better than you found it” – Hundhausen

List of the sessions I attended: