I have a lot of praise for the St Louis Day of .Net 2009. It was by all measures a smash. For $100 you get plenty of content and 500 .Netters to network and mingle. While I have lots of good things to say about the event, I have some suggestions for next year too. Most of this was mentioned in the attendee survey they sent out after the event, but it would help to get the message out again.

Pre registration

I think it would help a lot of each session would be prefixed with both a content category and a number to indicated its level of intensity. It would help to easily identify the courses you think are appropriate and worth your time. UX101 and ARC402 both are easily identifiable as a low level user experience session and a high level architecture session. The rooms loosely highlighted the topic, but I think something more explicit would be better.

Just a minor thing with the website, but the session catalog should link to the descriptions. It felt like a bad experience to have to look up the description on a different page.

Registration

Registration moved much faster than I expected. The line was long, but it took no time to make it through. The only thing I would change would be to make it more clear the lines were divided by the first letter of your last name. It wasn’t clear and my friend and I stood in line together, but only one of us was in the right line. Not a big deal, they took care of him, but it was a minor confusion that could be avoided in the future.

The bags were nice, but I felt unnecessary. I don’t think anyone would miss the shirts, and you could even sell them for $20 or so and I think you would get plenty of takers. I didn’t like having the bag because I didn’t like carrying it around the rest of the day. Handing out a small notebook, stuffed with the vendor flyers, would have made more happier. Also, there was no pen in the notebook. Not a problem, because the vendors were handing out that stuff.

Breakfast

Breakfast was great. Plenty of coffee, plenty of pastries, just nothing else. Fruit or yogurt would be good and have less sugar for those concerned with that sort of thing.

Quick Start Sessions

I am not a fan of the quick start sessions. The one I picked the first day made getting up that early feel very disappointing. It would be great if we could get a keynote by someone even moderately famous. Or if that isn’t possible, maybe talk with 3 or 4 developers working on big projects in St Louis using .Net. (e.g. Woot.com). I like the idea of seeing all 500 people in the same room and more importantly, all leaving the room at the same time to go hit the sessions.

I wouldn’t mind the quick start if they were on a completely foreign topic, like Git, FitNesse, Windows Mobile development. Quick starts on Ajax and Silverlight don’t interest me.

Lunch

Lunch was way too long. It ended up being 95 minutes. It didn’t take near that long to eat, and the rest was spent just sitting around. It would be nice if we could make use of that time by either having areas setup for more open discussions, or even having a topic slated for each room where people could group and talk about “testing” for example. It could be moderated by a session presenter. People could eat and talk, but hopefully not at the same time. Another idea for lunch would be to do the quick start sessions. Again I would do them on interesting topics.

As far as the food goes, it was as good as boxed lunches could be. Being at the casino, it would have been nice to eat at the buffet they have there.

In between the Sessions

While not in the sessions, it would be nice to have areas where people can go and mingle with other people about a certain topic. For example you could have the testing corner were people could chat with the testing session presenters or other people who want to talk about testing. Even going as far as having Xboxes setup with Rock Band, or Halo would kill those rare times when no sessions are appealing. The games might provide enough of an ice breaker to get our highly social kind to talk amongst ourselves.

After Day One

After day one I would rather see an event where we could mingle more. I think the night club probably scared away a good amount of the attendees. It would be nice if the first night was just snacks and drinks, followed by a more killer event on the next night. It also didn’t make me want to stay and hang out very late knowing I would be getting up early the next day.

I wasn’t a fan of the night club, but I’ve already voiced my complaints about that.

Overall

Don’t let the suggestion let you think I didn’t have a great time. I would do it again in a heartbeat. It is only going to get better if we let them know what we would like to see done better.