The world has changed quite a bit since I was a child. When I was a kid, our family had one telephone on the wall, and it was a party line with our neighbors next door. We had to listen to make sure that they were not using the line before we could make a call. My siblings and I were not allowed to make long distance calls, that is, any that were outside of our small town. Now we have phones that we carry around in our pockets and handbags that are actually small computers more powerful than the computers used in the space program back in the 70s. We carry the knowledge of the world in our hands with the answer to any question just seconds away. Our phones are much better than the communicator that Captain Kirk carried in the science fiction TV show “Star Trek.” We even talk to Cortana or Siri much like Jim Kirk did to Computer.

Much of the current amazing technology was evident this weekend at the final St. Louis Days of .NET (more about this later). In the past, when I have spoken at this event, I have not stayed around for the sessions, leaving right after speaking. This year, however, I stayed for most of the two session days and attended several sessions. I spoke on Friday morning on the “Five top mistakes you are probably making with SQL Server” and on Saturday with “Introduction to Execution Plans” and “SQL Server Q&A with Dan and Kathi.” My two sessions were standing room only, and the session with fellow Data Platform MVP Dan Guzman was almost full.

I checked the schedule and started seeing some pretty interesting topics. I ended up going to sessions on the Raspberry PI and Windows 10, using Azure Machine Learning for a lie detector test, and a session on Microsoft Band development, among others. The three sessions I mention here made me just want to drop everything SQL Server related and start having fun with C# and devices. I envy the young developers just starting out their careers. I can’t imagine what the future will bring, but I’m sure it will be pretty exciting.

As I mentioned, this is the last year for St. Louis Days of .NET. The very successful conference is continuing with a new name “Dev Up.” I expect that it is going to continue to be a fantastic conference for years to come under the new name.