The 2007 edition of the Tulsa Tech Fest has finally ended.

Today I went to a couple of different sessions. The first was about balancing agile development and plan-based development. I was expected to come out of the session with some good information, but I didn’t feel I gained any new knowledge. I got some clarity on a few issues, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

After that I attended Evan Hoff’s presentation on TDD. This was very useful information and it was great to see some real TDD/Resharper usage in action. Evan is a great presenter and made a great case for TDD using [whatever]Unit and Resharper. At the end, Evan gave away a copy of Resharper (likely donated by jetBrains) and my friend Debuke snagged it – grats David.

After that, I hung out in the green room with Laribee and a few others folks and listened to them talk about some of the various services they used (like Amazon S3, etc.). It was interesting, I certainly know the pains of getting smaller applications hosted on the web. Of course, most of my work ends up in one of our corporate data centers so I haven’t had to deal with that too much lately.

The Hartford threw down a speaker to talk about Enterprise use of open source technology. I honestly felt this was a horrible way to end the conference. The speaker didn’t ring a bell with me at all, and we use a ton of open source code in our products. Many of our internal systems are built on JBoss, GlassFish, Castle, etc. and nothing said really made any sense. I felt like the presenter was really on a different page compared to my experience.

Last were announcements and giveaways. I snagged a copy of dotTRACE, another Jetbrains product. My friend Alan managed to score the grand prize, a quad-core 3gb desktop machine with Vista on it. Very cool, I bet he’s glad he came to the event now!

This year, the TechFest was a major step up compared to last year. The initial year had some problems but the event was still great (I presented twice last year, only once this year). This year, the content was excellent, attendance was huge, and I think everyone had a good time. I think it helped that I knew more people this year as well. David Walker did a great job and I can’t wait to see what happens next year!

That’s a wrap!