Grant did an excellent job with his Devscovery in Review post, but I have a few things to add.

Day 1 Session 3: I attended “Building Scalable, High-Performance Web Apps with ASP.NET”. Jeff Prosise is definitely an ASP.NET guru; he also developed the ASP.NET track for DevDays 2004. The most interesting thing I learned was how to create a custom user control caching mechanism.

Day 2 Session 1: I attended “Exception Handling” with Jeffrey Richter. He did an excellent job proposing his own exception management philosophy. Basically, if a method does not do what it says it will do, throw an exception. If you know the method will fail often enough, change its name to TryXXX, with many references to the threading model. Favorite quote: “On Error Resume Next turns any method into a random number generator.”

Day 2 Session 3: I attended “New Whidbey C# Features” which should really have been called “C# Generics.” Despite the name, Jason Clark did an excellent job describing how generics are implemented in both .NET and Java. This kind of in-depth comparison I think is really important. He continued on about when to use generics and when not to, and cautioned against the overuse that comes when developers get new coding toys. :)

Day 2 Evening: After outing Grant’s nerd crush, we proceeded to wander around looking for a good sports bar to watch hockey. We couldn’t find anything good, so we went back to the hotel where we all fell asleep before the middle of the second period.

Day 3 Session 1: I attended the “What's New in ASP.NET 2.0” talk with Jeff Prosise. Lots of exciting stuff is heading our way!

Why else should you attend Devscovery? You could win a Tablet PC (your choice of three different ones), an MP3 player, 6 months of web hosting, Xbox games, and more. You also get a free subscription to MSDN Magazine as well as the standard conference goody bag. I won an Xbox game myself, which was pretty nice.