The 2006 edition of the Great Lakes Great Database Workshop (GLGDW, aka Whilfest) wrapped up last Monday in Milwaukee. Others who were there, including Doug Hennig and Rick Schummer, have already posted excellent conference wrap-ups on their blogs that include individual conference session summaries, so I'll just add a couple of general comments here.
GLGDW has a well-deserved reputation for being an excellent conference, and this year was certainly no exception. After a 2 1/2 year hiatus since the last one in October 2003, Whil brought the conference back in a somewhat different format this year. For one thing, it was essentially just a weekend conference, running from Friday evening to Monday noon instead of stretching over four of five days. For another, there was only one track this year, meaning each session was presented only once and everybody attended the same session at the same time. Also, the entire conference was focused on the single theme of "Best Practices for Visual FoxPro", which gave a certain continuity to the sessions.
The one-track format allowed everyone, including speakers, to attend all the sessions. This worked out pretty well for everyone, particularly so for the speakers because we don't ordinarily get to see the whole show. The smaller size of this conference also facilitated more than the usual amount of dialog between the speakers and the audience during the sessions, which added to the informal feeling of this event. Larger, multi-track conference formats are good because they can accommodate a wider variety of topics and a greater number of speakers and attendees, but the intense "weekend jam session" nature of this year's GLGDW was a nice change of pace.
Kudos to all the other speakers, who did a uniformly excellent job with their sessions, and thanks to everyone who attended and helped make the weekend happen. As always, Whil Hentzen deserves a ton of credit for putting it all together, and his daughter Aleix earns special recognition for helping to keep things running smoothly throughout the entire weekend.
I took a few snapshots at the conference. You can see them at www.ita-software.com/GLGDW2006_Photos/index.html.
Tags: FoxPro, VFP, GLGDW, Whilfest
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