A long day of seminars

Just got home from a long day of Black Marble hosted presentations. This morning I was presenting on SQL 2008, seemed to go well. This afternoon it was a very busy MSDN session by Martin Parry and Daniel Moth from the Microsoft DPE team on VS2008 and .NET 3.5. Finally this evening there was a interesting community event on the .NET Micro Framework by Rob Miles, the same session he is doing at TechEd in Barcelona, worth getting along to if you are there, if not try the book.

Considering how many developers turned up for the MSDN event I was surprised how relatively few decided to stay for the evening event, even though it only meant a short wait between session and food was laid on. The numbers attending community/evening events seems to be constant issue for events in Leeds and Bradford. I am often surprised in the low number I see at evening events we host (compared to day events) but I see the same at BCS and the Yorkshire Extreme Programming Club events, even with the high quality speakers we are seeing at all three venues.

I was talking on this very subject to the David Turner the chair(?) of the Yorkshire Extreme Programming Club, we both were wondering what can be done to get people enthused and networking locally with their peers. I am interested to hear other peoples views - what more does the developer on the street (or more correctly at the PC) need to get them out to events. Is what we see in Yorkshire the same in other places? I have seen good crowds at user groups I have presented at or attended around the country but maybe I have just gone on good days.

The attendance at local events and national one area that Gary Short touched upon in his recent blog post. Do people just want to turn out for big national events? or does it seem that way because having a national catchments for attendees means any event fills up fast?

Any comments ?