I was very fortunate to go to OreDev this year. It's just a great show - I described it as a "free bar of knowledge alcohol for learn-o-holics".
I thought I'll take a few moments just to jot down some highlights and stuff I picked up during my first day at OreDev 2011. This is mostly for me... but you can read it if you want.

Jon Skeet on Async in .NET 4.0

I was late to the conference and missed the keynote, that I learned was awesome, and also late to this talk. Jon Skeet on the asynchronous features of .NET 4.0. I picked up some stuff though - most noteable I'll check out the EduAsync blog posts and code that shows of all interesting features. 

Aslam Kahn on Functional programming

From this great session I picked up how Alsam had learned functional programming and how that changed how he thought about functional programming; building from simple structures and doing simple transformations on them, to finally abstract concepts on top of that. 
Stop think about interactions between objects and start thinking of values of data and transformations on those data instead. Keep it immutable and return something from every function.
That doesn't come out right here but was great. 

Sebastian Lambla on Restful API

This was a great presentation. Loads of fun and a real practical introduction to REST. Thought me to:
  • Send links back to the client so they now WHERE to go next; Link: ; rel="next"
  • Send back an empty form so the client knows WHAT to send back
  • Don't version - but break if data is needed. If not needed use optional values
  • Send control data in the form so that the client knows HOW to send additional requests
All this will reduce coupling between the client and the server. 

Phil Haack on Mobile in ASP.NET 4

Phil struggled with the technology for the presentation but still showed some nice features and ways to make you web application be more mobile friendly. 
I'll sure check out JQueryMobile that looks awesome 

Christian Johansen on TDD and JavaScript

This was another great session on how to do TDD in JavaScript. Amusing fact was that 100% of the people in the audience did TDD. 0% (!) of us did it in JavaScript. 
Christian had some mean skills and the flow of the session was great. I'll check out JsTestDriver and maybe even check out his book.

Felix Geisendörfer on Node.js

And finally I went to learn some more about Node.js. I think it sound very cool and I was blown away; this is huge (#2 watched project on GitHub, 230 contributors).
And the performance was equally impressive due to that everything in Node.js is what's called a "Non-blocking call" or asynchronously if you want. 
And then my day came to a full circle with async again.