Last week I attended PluralSight's CampSight Server Edition in Redmond. After attending Guerrilla .NET a few years ago when .NET 1.0 went RTM, I was really thrilled with the in-depth coverage and long classroom hours (12 per day). CampSight was 10+ hours per day, and the format is different from something like Guerrilla .NET because of the wide range of topics. In that case it is breadth versus depth. There were some very interesting discussions and topics covered at CampSight. Keith Brown, Fritz Onion, and Aaron Skonnard are absolutely awesome instructors. The topics that I personally enjoyed the most were:

After the weekend and a couple of days to digest all of this stuff, I've had time to sort of weigh the "breadth versus depth" training as a cost-benefit analysis. I am independent, so I have no employer other than myself to pay for training  expenses. Typically, I hate instructor-led training (ILT), and I'd rather just read a bunch of books. This is mostly because of a real lack of quality instructors. However, I'll splurge on some ILT training maybe every 3-4 years because of the expense and just to make sure I'm being extremely diligent in staying up-to-date on everything. If I do so, I'm going to go with the caliber of instructors that PluralSight and DevelopMentor have; not some whacked out place like "Timmy Braehan's Training Company." So, I came to the conclusion that I prefer in-depth training. I probably would have been better off taking either a week-long BizTalk course or ASP.NET 2.0. I found that a lot of the stuff I saw at CampSight was high-level coverage of things that I have already played around with or used in production already. I have an MSDN subscription, I familiarize myself with betas and CTPs, read a lot of MSDN articles, and do my best to keep up with the bloggers in the various spaces that I work. I've  worked through the BizTalk labs from MSDN  in the past, read a  quite a bit about Indigo already, implemented WS-Security with WSE 2.0 in production, implemented contract-first ASMX in production, etc. Of course, CampSight gave me a chance to "fill some of the holes" and the opportunity to ask a lot of off-topic questions, which was nice. Aaron, Fritz, and Keith were all super cool about taking questions, and that was a real value-add. But because I only afford myself the luxury of a training event every few years, a depth-based class like Guerilla makes more sense for me personally. And just in case I haven't made myself perfectly clear and so I don't hurt anyone's feelings: for the record, there is absolutely nothing wrong with having a course with a wide-range of topics, it just doesn't fit my needs as well as focusing on one particular topic or Server product. My only real complaint was the amount of bugs in the demos and labs (plus the lack of coke products to drink - pepsi sucks). Other than that, the hotel was nice, there were some cool demos from the IIS7, BizTalk, WhiteHourse, and Indigo teams...plus a fun little coding contest on Thursday night.

 

It was entertaining and informative, but I'm glad to be back home.  :-)