Today I attended the Cleveland Day of .Net.  Well, to be more accurate, I attended the first half, leaving during lunch to head home.  The three talks I made it to were really very good.

Joe O'Brien started the day with a good introduction to Ruby.  I had seen ruby a little bit while looking at rails for my current work project, but his talk really made things gel a little bit.  Also, the insight into how IronRuby is being developed was quite interesting.

The second talk, was Alan Stevens presentation on TDD.  He used the ASP.NET MVC as part of the demonstrations - something which I am very interested in and would have been the technology of choice for my work project if it was released.  Again, I've read quite a bit about TDD in the past, but Alan helped the concepts to gel.  He is a very dynamic speaker, and if you have a chance to catch one of his talks, you should make sure to attend.

Finally, Nate Kohari gave a talk about something that was almost completely new to me - Dependency Injection/Inversion of Control with Ninject.  Nate did a great job.  I wouldn't have guessed that this was his first talk in front of a large group.  He kept the attention of the audience, finished right on time and completely kept his cool when the projector broke down mid-way through the talk.  Interesting to note - it was Alan who "refactored" the power connection to the projector on the fly and got it back up and running without blowing the bulb.  When I got home, I downloaded the Ninject bits and spent a few hours getting it to work in some of the unit tests that I'm working on for my day job.  So, in an ironic turn of events, Nate may be working for Merge again, just without getting paid for it :)  I have a long way to go before I grok Ninject, but I'm looking forward to giving it a go, and having fun blogging about it along the way.

One of the most surprising thing to see at a .Net conference was that all three of these speakers gave their presentations with MacBooks.  Seeing Vista and Leopard running on a sleek black MacBook got my juices flowing and now I'm very close to buying one of my own.  I just have to have what all the cool kids have.