The entire Crown Plaza Five Seasons hotel was sold out with HDC attendees. The conference began with a pre-conference party and finished with the giveaway of a fully tricked out AlienWare PC donated by AMD. The first full day of the conference included and evening party with a gaming zone that despite a couple of technical difficulties early on, was a bit hit with everyone that attended. I spoke with both attendees and sponsors and the feedback was unequivocal in this being one of the best conferences in the country.

Special kudos go out to Joe Olsen, Phil Wolfe, and Eric Johnson for being the driving force behind this conference. These guys are dedicated community leaders that put in an incredible amount of time and effort to make the second HDC bigger and better than ever. And the best thing about these guys is that this year’s conference had not even wrapped up and they were already discussing ways to make next year’s event surpass 500 developers and improve on an already great conference.

For those that are interested, the slides to my presentation, How to Build an ASP.NET Portal in About an Hour, are available for download in the Downloads section. I should have the code for the demo posted later this week (as soon as I get my USB drive in the mail - thanks Phil for grabbing that!!!!).

Update: The code for the presentation has been added to the slide deck download above. It is not an exact match to what I did in the presentation since I tend to hack some stuff on the fly, but it is pretty darn close.

Update 2: Download link fixed.