I spoke at the 2024 Visual Studio Live Conference. The event ran from March 3–8, in Las Vegas at the Paris Hotel. VS Live is a conference for software developers and technical managers who use Microsoft technologies. It’s one of my three favorite technical conferences. Bottom line: I gained a lot of useful information and had a good time.

I estimate there were about 400-500 attendees, speakers, and staff. A typical attendee was a mid-30s aged senior developer at a large finance related company. For example, several of people I talked to worked at insurance companies and banks.

Left: My two talks were well attended, and the attendees asked a lot of excellent questions. Right: The food was very, very good.

Attendees were mostly male (probably about 95%), which is normal for developer conferences, but it seemed to me that the number of women attending is slowly, but definitely, increasing at VS Live and other events.

VS Live has been going since 1993, which is a testament to its quality. The event organizers, Danielle, Brent, Sarah, and the rest, do a great job with regards to logistics and keeping the topics up to date and relevant. This year was the 12th time I’ve spoken at VS Live.

Unlike many developer conferences which happen only once a year, there are several VS Live events every year in different cities. For 2024, the conference Web site lists Las Vegas, Chicago, Redmond, and Orlando. See http://vslive.com for details.

I presented two technical talks. The first talk was “Introduction to Neural Networks using C#”. The second talk was “Data Anomaly Detection From Scratch Using a C# Neural Autoencoder”. Both of my talks were attended by about 100 people.

Here’s one of the slides I used in my talk on neural networks.

Microsoft was well-represented at the VS Live conference. A Microsoft senior product marketing manager, Jim H, put together a nice lunch time event for clients. I was very happy to see some official Microsoft attention being paid to the Visual Studio integrated development tool — in some sense, Visual Studio is the tool that made Microsoft great for enterprise developers.

I can recommend the Visual Studio Live event. It’s smaller than some other developer conferences, but the speakers are excellent and there was at least one talk I wanted to sit in on in every time slot. Of course, the main problem related to attending a conference is usually cost. You can’t really afford to pay for yourself so you want to get your company to send you. All the attendees I talked to said that they felt that their company was getting good value by sending them to the event.

I know I get huge value by speaking at the VS Live conference. It keeps me informed and up to date with trends in the software development community, I learn a lot of good tech stuff, and I return to my workplace with renewed energy which makes me more productive.

Conferences at Las Vegas always have associated parties in the evening. Left: How people who haven’t been to Vegas imagine what technical conference parties are like. Right: What technical conference parties are actually like.

The scene on the left is from the movie “Babylon” (2022). The scene on the right is from “Animal House” (1978).