Another HDC come and gone.  This was the best year in the history of the conference by far.  Pre-party and Developer Jam were top notch, the "track-less" format didn't force speakers into categories and allowed for more diversity in sessions, lightening rounds increased the number of talks at the event, great balance of alumni and new speakers as well as local and international speakers.  Job well done goes to Joe Olsen and Phenomblue!

I was invited to give 1 regular length talk as well as one lightening round talk.  Lately I haven't been able to claim the master of any one technology as things are changing so quickly with .NET 3.5, 4.0, and related technologies.  I decided to give one talk on Human Computer Interaction (HCI).  I had a Creighton University class on this subject and thought that other developers and designers could benefit from the more theoretical as opposed to technical material.  I didn't expect to get many attendees in my talk because I was going "against" several other good speakers, some of whom were from out of town.  You can hear me at least once a year at the local user group.  I turns out that my session was standing room only, even to the end of the talk.  (Thank you very much if you attended.)  I had a great time giving it and received pretty good feedback.

The other talk I gave was a 30 minute intro to code branching and merging.  We have worked hard on getting this right in the past on our team and I wanted to share our findings as they differ at bit from the recommendations on CodePlex.

HCI Talk Slides
Branching Slides