This is probably more of a community wiki question.
Who will be attending the ESRI Developer Summit next month in Palm Springs?
Which sessions and/or new products look most interesting to you?
What tips would you give for attendees who are there for the first time?
Thanks.
And for the UK there is http://www.esriuk.com/trainingevents/events/dev_conference11/ [Birmingham, UK] for those cannot attend the US ESRI Summit.
Remember that technical sessions are videotaped and posted after the conference if you're having trouble deciding between two. If a presentation will be repeated, it will be on Thursday afternoon.
If you attend a technical session, please fill out the evaluation form. Yes, the presenters do get to see the comments (after they've been transcribed) and comments about general issues were passed on to presenters this year.
If you're looking for a particular Esri employee, you can ask in the Showcase for someone to check their schedule--to see when they're giving a presentation or have 'island' duty.
When asking about an issue at one of the product islands, you may well get, "Unfortunately, that's not my area; let me see who's available." The people on the islands (like me!) are often not generalists.
As others have commented, don't be afraid to step up and talk to the Esri employees. At the product islands, we get told to not group together as it's harder for customers to 'break in'. Although some groups are valid as several people are listening to a customer, other times we're just chatting--waiting for someone to talk to us!
Technical Support and Customer Service are available in the Showcase.
The Showcase closes Wednesday at 6 PM.
Std Disclaimer: I work for Esri as a product engineer on the 'projection engine'.
I'm going, went last year for the first time. It's a great dork-fest! Here's my 2 cents:
Thanks to Stackexchange for sponsoring me to attend the Dev Summit! It was great to meet so many people who have been active here at gis.stackexchange. A couple of the videos from day 1 of the Dev Summit have been posted here. Over the next couple weeks more videos should get posted.
Here are some of the Dev Summit highlights for me:
ArcGIS Application Builder For Microsoft Silverlight
If you sign up for beta program you can download it. Installation on Win7 64bit was a bit tricky for me, but now is working. It is extensible via MEF, so even though the app you build is called a Viewer, it can be extended to support editing.
Side by Side (SxS) Runtime deployment for 10.1
GIS on a stick with Esri will be supported on 10.1. I wonder if I can have two development versions on the same machine. Read more on this thread.
Sessions
I attended some excellent user tracks and tech sessions, including:
I'll update this with links to actual presentations when they are posted later.
GIS Data in the Cloud
I hadn't been following Azure, so it was news to me that spatial types are supported. Now if only microsoft could figure out a way to host a geometric network in Azure. Until then I'll need to use Amazon web services ... they said they might even host my geometric network for free. I heard rumors that Entity Framework will soon support spatial types. Esri continues to devote a lot of resources to ArcGIS Online. I didn't hear any discussion of the ArcGIS OnLine business model though.
Dodgeball (Next Olympic Sport?)
Couldn't get enough people together in time for a GIS.StackExchange team, but had a blast watching. Now if only I could remember those 5 D's ...
Update
Video of a Road Map for ArcGIS Server Developers has been published.
I agree with Chad, definately don't be shy as you won't get anything from it.
I'm always interested in what is coming out on the radar, it does give you a good heads up. It's also great to get to meet Esri Inc. developers especially if you're not in the US and have some questions your dying to get answered.
I wasn't impressed with the UK one - very limited as it's only just started up. If you're a desktop developer only then you won't get much from the UK one. In comparison terms if you're going to go to a dev summit and you are a serious ESRI GIS developer then there is nothing that currently replaces the dev summit. If you can't get to the US then unless there is someting specific you want to see on the UK agende then I suggest spending a day looking into researching something new, much more worth it. Unless you have a dying need to get out of the office for a day ;)
Don't forget you can get the videoed sessions from the devsummit on the dev summit page after a couple of weeks or month. They don't replace going but they can be really useful.
gis.se user meetup
It has been suggested to have a meetup of sorts of gis.se users on Tuesday night after the Meet the Teams event (which Melita informed is by the pool this year) - a chance to get to know one another. Kirk and myself are definitely in, anyone else who's interested leave a comment on this answer, please. Also, if you have ideas for a venue (hotel bar is fine by me), leave that as well.
I agree with all the answers so far. If you cannot attend, try to watch the #devsummit hashtag on twitter to get a pulse on what everyone there is saying. Also watch for the Plenary videos which will be uploaded onto the DevSummit site later in the evening of March 8th. http://www.esri.com/devsummit We will also start loading all 130 or so tech session videos onto the ArcGIS Resource Center starting the end of next week (3/12 or so). http://resources.arcgis.com/
Make it a point to attend at least one user presentation or watch the videos once they have been posted. They are generally very well done and provide a good opportunity to see what other developers are working on. Plus, they are a nice diversion from the standard ESRI tech session format.
