First off, I chose not to bring my PC laptop, since I thought it would just be in the way, and that I'd do fine with just my MacBook Pro. I installed MonoDevelop on it a few weeks ago, and it seemed fine, it even ran MVC, and had a built-in MVC Project template. However, it doesn't run .NET 4.0, so I had plenty of time to listen and blog, instead of doing coding. Yeah, I know. I suck. Next time, I'll bring a Windows computer to a Microsoft event, I should have figured as much.
The setup here at MIX10 isn't really optimized for attendees with laptops requiring power, there are 100 people in the room, and approximately 12 utility outlets. I chose to move my chair to the wall, where my power cord would reach. And as Jon Galloway said, "I was hoping that people would be sitting with laptops and typing along". That won't be happening for a three and a half hour long workshop, obviously.
I don't really feel that Jon had prepared his session very well, I get that it's hard to set a target audience level, when you know nothing about your audience, but, you could assume that when you're doing a workshop, you shouldn't use a Visual Studio version (2010), that isn't released yet, and provide samples for attendees that won't run on the currently released version, 2008. That's not cool at all.
Most attendees started out with their laptops in their laps, (since there were no tables, just chairs), but after about 40 minutes, most of them had put them down.
I might seem very negative, but I think the workshop content was very interesting, however, not very well delivered. I might be wrong here, but all of the attendees have actually paid an extra $295 for the workshops, and in my book, that sets a requirement of quality for workshop content.
You can watch the Workshop over at Channel 9.
