It's another year, which means it's soon going to be time to figure out which conferences I'll be attending over the next few months. So far, three conferences have come up on my radar and I suspect I'll attend at least two of them. The conferences in order of my likelihood of attending them are
VSLive: A conference for Visual Studio developers. I'll likely be there with other folks from MSN Windows Live to talk about the various APIs we provide and perhaps give hints or details on some of our upcoming API plans.
ETech: I attended this conference last year and found it extremely valuable. There were developers from small and large Web companies talking about technical issues they had faced while delivering services on the Web as well as announcing cool new offerings. The list of speakers is great; Danah Boyd, Joel Spolsky, Kathy Sierra, Sam Ruby, Jon Udell, Simon Willison and Ray Ozzie. I don't plan to miss this one.
MIX: This is a Microsoft conference that will focus on our hip, Web-based offerings like IE7, Windows Media, Windows Live!, as well as "Atlas", Microsoft’s new AJAX framework. Given that I'll already have lost a week of work by attending ETech and I won't really be learning anything I can't find on internal websites by attending the conference, I'll probably miss this one. Of course, if my workload is light and/or I'm told I'll be speaking I might end up attending.
If you'll be at any of these conferences and would like to meet up to shoot the breeze about mindless geekery, holla at me. Also what other interesting Web geek conferences are out there?