Musings after returning from STL Day of .Net

So I went to the St. Louis Day of .NET conference this weekend with most of my co-workers in the development group. All in all, it was a good experience, though there's apparently video of me asleep on the drive up that I haven't seen yet. The main complaint I have about the conference is that there's too many things I didn't get to see because I was in another session at the time. I'd love to have a video of each session that I could go back and watch. Particularly the Tips and Tricks for Visual Studio, since that one apparently was fast paced and I might need to pause it to take notes.

My favorite demonstration would have to have been the presentation on creating games with Silverlight. I'm not a game programmer, but the interface created by the methods used could be re-used in applications. As with many of my fellow geeks, programming started with games, not the "hello world" we all know and loathe.

The first app I remember writing was a maze game much like the Tron lightcycles, but with the bike as a single pixel with a line trailing behind it on my TI82. It was an adaptation of someone elses game that I reverse engineered and extended to have a map loader, a method of actually winning, and the beginnings of a map designer. I also wrote a TIE-Fighter FPS for it. Kind of cheesy looking back, but the drawing functions on the TI82 made it a lot easier to write a game in TIBasic than, for example, in C++ or C#. Those interfaces, though, were how I learned to create an intuitive and effective interface for later apps, some that I actually used for homework.