Student wanting to go to a developer conference

Question

I'm a 21 year old student in my last year of University, and I am looking for information about developer conferences.

I live in Derby (United Kingdom) and there's not (As far as I know) many conferences local to where I live. I do have a car at my disposal so travelling shouldn't be a problem.

I was hoping somebody could recommend the best way to go about finding and attending a conference, which one is probably the best to go to and what kind of things I'd need to know and take beforehand.

I've done a couple of Google searches and searched SO itself but nothing specific to my needs was found.

Note: I'm primarily a C# developer using WPF and WinForms but I'm open to pretty much anything.

Answer 1

I'd recommend you check out the various regional "DDD" (Developer Developer Developer) community events centred around .NET. They run a few times a year in a few locations and tend to cover a wide variety of mostly .NET based topics.

Free and community run.

Enjoy.

Answer 2

The BCS events calendar might be worth a browse (there's a lot of non-BCS events listed too).

Bear in mind most conferences aren't cheap. I suspect you're more likely to find the more academic-influenced ones run by the likes of BCS/IEEE/ACM/universities offering student discounts than the purely commercial ones (vendor-subsidised promotional events excepted).