I attended Deeper in .NET yesterday, along with a few hundred others. It was an excellent day filled with .NET goodness. I’m not sure what the actual attendance count was, but I guess it was higher than last year’s event.

We learned about:

  1. WCF (formerly Indigo) Top to Bottom with Michele Leroux Bustamante
  2. Anatomy of a Successful ASP.NET Application: Inside DasBlog with Scott Hanselman
  3. ADO.NET 2.0 Integration with SQL Server 2005 with Julia Lerman
  4. AJAX and Atlas with Bill Hatfield
  5. Using WPF (formerly Avalon) to Create Compelling User Interfaces with Jason Beres

The presentations were excellent and at least as good as last year. The best part about the event is the fact that it’s completely FREE to attend! If you missed out this year, then you don’t want to miss it next year.

The users group held an evangelism blogging contest for the event. To participate all you had to do was blog about the event ahead of time and send an email to register in the WI .NET Users Group Evangelist Directory. Then the WI .NET Users Group Executive Committee would collectively choose a winner and announce the winner at the Deeper in .NET 2006 event. The grand prize for the contest was a copy of MSDN Premium Subscription with Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite, worth over $10,000.

I am happy to say that I entered the blogging contest and won! I now have my very own MSDN Subscription for one year. Now that is an awesome prize!

There was also a total of about $70,000 dollars worth of prizes given away through out the day, so I wasn’t the only one that brought something home. One of the prizes given away was another MSDN Subscription.

If you’re a .NET developer and aren’t already a member of the Wisconsin .NET Users Group then go to the official site (http://wi-ineta.org) and join; after all it’s FREE.

**Update 4/24/2006:**

I have to thank all the members of the WI .NET Users Group Executive Commitee, the MVP's that donated the subscription and any one else involved with the Evangelist Blogging contest. This is a great prize and awesome community recognition for my blogging efforts. It really inspires me to blog more and get more involved with the WI .NET Users Group.