Despite not winning the INETA grand prize, I won some great licenses to Telerik, ComponentOne, and SyncFusion components. I already use the Telerik Ajax controls on a daily basis, I'm excited to try out the ComponentOne suite and the MVC tools from SyncFusion.
And even more good news, I found out I will still be attending Microsoft PDC this year (Nov 17-19) thanks to my boss. In fact, our small team will be going -- awesome. Looking forward to learning about all the new stuff that is coming out. It seems like this year has seen more new technologies than most so it should be interesting. Plus, my brother-in-law lives 3 blocks from the LA convention center and has an extra parking space -- how perfect is that?
If anyone has any suggestions for which talks to make sure to attend please let me know! I'm halfway through a Wrox ASP.NET MVC book, and playing with LINQ and of course JQuery and fun ASP.NET 3.5 Ajax things. I'm also hoping to finish the Silverlight labs that I didn't finish at the Irvine Microsoft training. Silverlight 3 already? MVC 2.0? Geez.. it's to easy to get behind.
See you there!