There was also one keynote session on each of the breakout days:  Jay Roxe, Visual Basic Product Manager from Microsoft talked about building and deploying application with Whidbey, while Pat Helland, Microsoft .NET Enterprise Architect presented an interesting talk where he drew parallels between historic changes in the development of cities and the current changes in information technology. He offered some interesting insights into where we are going in IT and a framework to understand the current trend toward service-oriented architectures.  The conference closed on Friday with two full-day post-conference sessions: C# as Better C++ and Architecture and Design for .NET.

In addition to many renowned US speakers like Keith Pleas, Rockford Lhotka, Billy Hollis, Ken Getz and many others, we also had some local Canadian talent on the stage sharing their expertise with developers.  Kate Gregory presented sessions on Web Services, Internationalization and Globalization, and COM Interop, Marcie Robillard talked about her favourite topic - ASP.NET DataGrid, and Dwayne Lamb focused on best practices for mobile development and MapPoint Location Server.

Informal surveys of the audience during lunch hour and other breaks indicated that the developer community was very satisfied with the quality of this conference and speakers that presented in Toronto.  Some of them even took time off work and paid for the sessions themselves because they felt that this was a well-worth their time and money.

On Wednesday night, all of the local user groups were invited to hear from many of the conference speakers. A panel of experts that included Kate Gregory, Rockford Lhotka, Keith Pleas, Jay Roxe, Billy Hollis, Richard Hale Shaw and Dwayne Lamb fielded questions from the audience and shared their views on tools and development topics.  This was followed by VSLive's customary Midnight Madness event where conference speakers and organizers took the stage throughout the evening as lots of cool prizes were dished out.

Kudos go to Craig Flannagan and his amazing Microsoft team that helped bring this event to Canada and pulled it all together in a few short months. Plans are already in the works for the next year's conference.  Hope to see you all there!