I recently attended Openforce 08 in Las Vegas ( aka Lost Wages?)  and was very happy I went.

I also attended OpenForce 07 and this year was much better from a DotNetNuke perspective.  The overall size of DevConnections was smaller --- this has more to do with the recent PDC and current economy than the quality of the presentations --  but it seem to me that the DotNetNuke attendance was larger - almost double !!

The Key Note given by Shawn was packed --- several others were there and have blogged about the number in attendance ... standing room only.   The following picture as taken by Micheal Washington at the Key Note -- I added the circle to point out I was there....

My primary reason for attending is to learn about DNN 5 and to re-charge the DNN interest within me, I also found talking to the community was great too.  The number of DNN-related vendors at the conference was impressive.  The R2i booth was especially impressive.

Speaking of the R2i booth, Kevin Schreiner presented "Extending DotNetNuke Modules with AJAX" and this presentation was worth the trip by itself.   Just one word --- JQUERY! ... this will be a great enhancement to V5, but Kevin showed how it could be used in any version of DNN .... I may even try it on a V2 site I have ...

Charles Nurse gave a presentation on DNN 5 that pointed at the underlying changes available in Version 5.  One I am very interested in is the ability to create your own container instead of using a User Control when developing a module.  Allows you to be much closer to the "ground" and not have to support the user control requirements -- especially true when using dynamic fields with a module.  I will have more to report on this in a few weeks (OK .. make that several weeks)

I also went to Richard Campbell's (another Canadian of DotNetRocks fame - etc) presentation on moving from a single server to a web farm environment .  What was really impressive was the fact that Richard had 5 servers in his presentation ...  They were little multi-media units from AOpen and ran Server 2008 64-bit!! and based on this Richard was able to enable the various features of a web farm environment and show the relative impact on the various servers.   If you are interested in this topic and attending a conference where Richard is presenting this session, by all means do try to attend.

I had missed a recent annoucement from Microsoft about the new MS Chart library but heard about it a Scott GU's keynote presentation on Tuesday morning.  MS made a deal with Dundas Chart (another Canadian company)  for their software and have used it to create a new base for all charting software used in MS products..  I was able to speak with Alex Gorev at the Microsoft booth in the Expo hall.  He is with MS, but worked with Dundas until recently .  See http://blogs.msdn.com/alexgor for more on this great new library. 

Lastly the OpenForce Social -- great time, but I did  not win a prize -- bummer!   I had ticket 27 and all the tickets around me were called. What I did find interesting were the large number of tickets --- they were up close to 300 ... again the place was packed. 

Well done by all ... 
Paul.