So the DevSummit is packed. Really packed. Every session I went to was standing room only. I must say that it's very cool to see that there are this many people who are doing development work with ArcGIS.
Everything has been really good for a "version 1" event. Kudos to Brian Goldin and everyone at ESRI for making this event happen.

There were only two "odd" things:

1) "Use Coarse Grained Objects" Mantra
This was consistent in almost every talk I attended - "look how much less code you'll write if you use a geoprocessing task instead of all that pesky ArcObjects code". I find this odd, because this is a "developer" conference, and I'd assume that most people are here to hear about using those pesky ArcObjects. Additionally, while I see how that can be useful for prototyping or quick one-off stuff,  but how can it be more performant than using the finer-grained classes? And the case for why I would add a geoprocessing model into an otherwise all .NET application was never really made - beyond "less code".

I could see a use case where a non-developer GIS Analyst needed to be able to modify aspects of the model without requiring recompiling the code, but I don't see that as the most common use case for this audience (maybe at the User Conference...). And as a developer, I explicily do not want the success / failure of my code to rely on something that a user COULD edit.  Maybe we could compile the model into an assembly as an embedded resource, thus avoiding the problem? Anyhow - I don't mean to rant about this, but it did seem odd. Maybe today will be the "fine grained objects rock!" day.

2) "Look what you can do at nine-point-two"
I had expected more discussion of released software. I think the description of the event even states that, and certainly Scott mentioned this in his keynote on Friday. But the demos were a lot of click-drag-neato-presto 9.2 Visual Studio integration & AFD stuff. While this is very, very, very cool (I wish we could blog about the beta), the release is not next week, so it was not exactly pertinent to what a developer will be doing on Monday morning. I did hear that there was a geoprocessing session which was very 9.1 focused, so maybe I just happened to be in the 9.2 sessions.

Overall, this is a great event, with lots of great information and awesome interaction with ESRI staff. If you did not make it here this year, start planning for next!