The Rocky Mountain Tech Trifecta v2 was the epitome of community and teamwork. Last year’s event started as your basic Code Camp that then grew by SQL and Windows tracks. Rocky Mountain Tech Trifecta v2 was a day full of .NET sessions, SQL sessions, Windows session, SharePoint sessions with a side of pizza.

We started at 7:30 am with (early) Birds of a Feather sessions while we set up breakfast and registration. At 8am our hearing impaired attendees started to arrive and since our interpreters had cancelled last minute they just started their own sessions; then Joe Wilson did an impromptu MVC session for them and Drew DeVault interpreted. By 9am we had checked in and directed over 400 attendees to the four different keynotes.

We had invited Scott Guthrie (aka “The Gu”) and he had to turn us down. But he was a great sport and let us video some fun footage for our .NET keynote. We “kidnapped” and “interrogated” him for details about Visual Studio 2010 and the keynote focused on new technologies that helped to locate and save The Gu. We had Steve Lange organize the team with TFS, Scott Golightly put the www.savethegu.com site in Azure, Beth Massi managed the double agents via a SharePoint site, Keith Brown covered security and David Yack used Silverlight in a Bing Maps application to locate The Gu at the interrogation site. We even had an impersonator in a red polo.

When his projector failed, presenter James Johnson didn’t let that stop him.  He flattened out his laptop and used a document camera to display his screen and presentation for his group.

The event hosts, Metro State College of Denver, requested a beginner track, level 100 learning. Kathleen Dollard, Jeff Certain, Ben Hoelting and Drew DeVault organized a full day of beginner sessions and their room was full all day. Our beginners were all given DreamSpark subscriptions. We had attendees in the sessions that were of all ages and a presenter that is 16 years old (the 16 yr old presenter was my son :) ).

Our presenters came from all over the country and we had attendees from coast to coast. There were evaluations that said sessions were too long and some said too short. Some said show more code, some said show less. The great thing about our day was the cross-technology sessions. A DBA probably wouldn’t attend a Code Camp; a developer would avoid a SQL PASS camp. But if all the sessions were in the same place on the same day, they would likely attend sessions from other technologies beside their chose field and gain a greater awareness of the other dependent technologies that need to work together.

Best quote from an eval…. “This event was as a good as some I’ve paid hundreds of dollars to attend.”

To the guy that left in a huff because it was a waste of time, I’m sorry the event wasn’t what you were expecting, would you like a refund?

Some numbers for you…

• 105 pizzas
• 6 deaf/hearing impaired attendees
• 1 speaker stranded in the snow in NYC
• 500 cookies
• 400 muffins
• 14 states that attendees came from
• 23 Dave’s in attendance
• 3784 oz of coffee consumed
• 55 sessions
• 1 kidnapping :)