Everything centrally located
One of the nice things about a smaller conference is that everything is centrally-located. All the sessions branched off a single hall in the hotel, pictured in Figure C.

FIGURE C


It was nice to have everything centrally located in a really nice-looking building. Roll over picture for a larger image.

You could leave a session and pop over to the exhibit hall to see vendors or grab lunch. Even though I was staying off-site at the Country Inn & Suites (which was very nice, by the way, as you can see in Figure D), it was pretty easy to get to the conference with no hassle at all.

FIGURE D


The Country Inn & Suites was very nice and a great bargain at $107 per night. Roll over picture for a larger image.

After talking to some of the people who stayed at the sprawling Marriott itself, I found out that my walk might have been comparable to theirs since the Marriott is spread out over such a large area.

.H1 Partying, Lotus Advisor DevCon style The main Tuesday night party was simple and subdued, but very fun. It included a buffet dinner in the middle of a golf course and pretend gambling, as shown in Figure E.

FIGURE E


Bet it all on Big Blue, baby! Roll over picture for a larger image.

I found myself having a lot of fun, and I actually learned to play craps, as shown in Figure F.

FIGURE F


learned how to play craps, so now I can go to Vegas and strike it rich. Roll over picture for a larger image.

One of my favorite things was how the person in charge of the craps table kept saying, "Throw it down like you don't want it," when people were putting down money.

Another special thing about Lotus Advisor DevCon is the nightly music jam sessions. I went to the one on Sunday night, and it was pretty neat, although it was hard for someone who is deaf in one ear like myself (just like George Bailey from It's a Wonderful Life, my favorite movie) to enjoy conversation with a band playing that close and loud. It was neat, though, to see a lot of the speakers and people from Advisor participating, and they showed a lot of talent.

Interesting things I learned at Lotus Advisor DevCon
I learned so much at Lotus Advisor DevCon that it would be impractical to list it all here, but I'll give you a sampling of some of the things that stick out in my mind.

Web Services
I learned that Web Services are doable now and that they're not that difficult to implement. Many speakers, such as Gary Devendorf, took a lot of the mystique out of Web Services by giving some simple examples of how they can be implemented into applications today. This was very powerful, and I really want to try to incorporate some Web Services into my own applications in the near future.

$$ViewTemplateDefault
This was briefly mentioned during Steve Caudill's presentation about building killer Web views, but it's very useful. The idea is that you create a $$ViewTemplateDefault form without an embedded view or $ViewBody field for your Domino Web databases. This is a way to prevent people from browsing views you use for Web lookups, etc. You then create a $$ViewTemplate form for views that should be viewable from the Web. This is a small idea, but a powerful one, that can help serve as part of a larger security plan. It shows, again, that it can just take a few small pieces of information to make the whole conference worthwhile.