BuildStuff 2014

I've just come back from an awesome conference in Lithuania - BuildStuff 2014.

This was the first full week remote conference I've been to and we had a lot of fun. We worked hard during the day, and explored the city at night.

JustEat sponsored one of the social events, and it was great to see so many familiar faces from Europe and further afield.

I don't think I'd do a full week of conference again though unless I was particularly stuck for ideas or needing inspiration. I think twitter and other social media channels are good enough to keep up to date but I think conferences are great for socialising and are a good platform for announcements of new technologies - and sometimes you need that.

The best part of the week for me was the debugging .NET applications talk and then full day workshop by Sasha Goldshtein. I'd recommend it to any .NET developer. We worked our way through how .NET allocates, where items are stored, and onto the tools like procdump and a deep dive into Visual Studios debugging capabilities which turn out to be great once you get to grips with them.

Here's a link to Sasha's Build Stuff 2014 .NET Garbage Collection tips from his talk.

Here's a link to Sasha's Build Stuff 2014 Debugging .NET Applications Workshop on his blog on MSDN.