Best technical learning conference for developers?

Question

In your opinion, what's the best technical conference for developers? What conferences have you attended, and what did you like about them/not like about them? I attended MS TechEd this year and learned a fair amount, but I'm interested in alternatives.
Edit: I'm mostly interested in .net technologies, but I'd like to hear about other technologies' conferences and what's been good/not good about them so I know more about what to look for.

Answer 1

Actually, it all depends on the technologies you'll be using.

Say, if you want to kick-start learning to use Google APIs, or you're just interested in Google's code you should attend a Google Developer Day

I would personally recommend attending The Next HOPE but that's not until 2010.

Security Conferences: Black Hat, Defcon

Java: Java One

Microsoft: MIX

...and many many others, this is by no means a complete list

Answer 2

Yeah, the best conferences are the ones most specific to their community. If you're working with open source in general, OSCON is your best bet. The Ruby community has RubyConf, and every other community has their own when they're large enough.

Answer 3

The best conference to attend is the conference you don't have to attend. Everyone is live blogging now-a-days so you can wait till the day after and do some searches on flickr, google blog search, qik, etc on the conference and you'll usually get a lot of the information that was presented at the conferences.

I've done this for ROFLCon, Kings of Code, Google IO, MacWorld, WWDC.

I would snoop through these conferences like this for a year and then see which one is best for you. I'd love to go to SXSW after watching twitter and the sites mentioned above with all the updates that came through.

Answer 4

I've attended CodeMash in Ohio two years now and have found the sessions, topics, and hallway conversations to be fascinating.

Microsoft is a sponsor, so you get top-notch .NET sessions of the latest/new stuff (Scott Guthrie demoing LINQ in 2007 for example) but the conference is language-agnostic with expert presenters from other programming languages and technologies.

Best of all, the attendees seem eager to learn more about technologies outside of their day-to-day activities. A raise of hands at the 2008 conference showed about 40% of the folks took vacation days from work and paid their own way to attend. That speaks volumes that folks find this conference valuable enough to attend on their own dime.

Answer 5

Since you said you're mostly interested in .NET technologies, the best developers conference is always the Microsoft PDC. TechEd is good, especially now that they have split it across two weeks for Developers and IT Pros, but it mostly focuses on current technologies and products while PDC focuses almost exclusively on future technologies and products.

TechEd is every year, PDC is only when Microsoft has very technical information or major releases to get in to the hands of a large number of developers. It's also generally a lot smaller than TechEd, with a lot less marketing glitz.

Answer 6

I'm a TechEd person myself, but will be attending PDC this year (10/26-30 in LA). What I like about these two conferences are, what Microsoft calls, the 'un-sessions': meeting the experts, taking hands-on labs, working on a small project in a small group. I found that I learn better through my hands than through my eyes/ears :)

Answer 7

What's working for me at the moment is signing up to a local .NET user group, especially if they do technical sessions of 15-25 people. You can learn a lot, less imposing to ask questions afterwards and easy access to the people that know their stuff.

Answer 8

Guys, I am in the process of building a workshop, and would appreciate some feedback on what you guys are looking for.

See thread:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1562029/help-with-starting-development-programming-workshop-feedback-needed

Thanks.

Answer 9

Øredev has the greatest reputation in the industry right now with a massive program packed with great speakers. Delegates and speakers alike all feel this conference is different. Vendor neutral and with a huge focus on "Sharing Knowledge". Hallway discussions are recognized as being very good.