One of the new features at TechEd SEA this year is Dotnet University that was held on Sept 11-14, 2007. As I mentioned at my 6 things I love about TechEd, this is an Instructor Led Lab (ILL) that focusing on .Net 3.0. It’s all about Windows Workflow, WPF, WCF, and Cardspace. The response from the attendees were overwhelming. They started to queue since 1 hour before every session. All available sessions are fully packed, even though the organizer managed to provide 5 sessions in a day.
 Actually the lab materials were not so deep. It gave an overview about 4 components in .NET 3.0, at level 200 from 500 scale. The public curiosity about this new framework is very high, that’s why the response was terrific. I hope the difficulties level will be improved at the next year since the adoption of .Net 3.0 going to be better.
I delivered the Workflow Foundation session at last class of the 3rd day (17.30 – 19.30). It was also fully packed, so my guess that the attendees prefer to go home was wrong. I did some demo with IF-ELSE branching and Code Activity, using Workflow designer for authoring workflow. Mark Dunn helped me a lot to handle the discussions at the QA session.
Another reason why they were very enthusiast was about the certificate and Dotnet University T-Shirt. They have to attend 4 session (WF, WPF, WCF, CardSpace) completely to be eligible for certificate and T-Shirt.
I want to bring this training to my community in Indonesia. In fact, I did the similar model with ASP.NET camp about 3 years ago. Since the ASP.NET adoption is quite good now, I think it’s the time to put .Net 3.0, SQL Server 2008, and “Orcas” to the picture. Do it with the bazaar model: cheap, large scale audiences, with the volunteer trainer who’s spent their time and share the knowledge for free.