JAOO Aarhus - I'm going there Monday to Wednesday

I'm going to the JAOO conference in Aarhus Monday to Wednesday - I'm really looking forward to going there. I'm reading through the program right now - there are several tracks you can follow, i.e. Cloud Computing, Enterprise 2.0, Programming Languages, Railing, Solution Track and The Odd Track.

The conference is called "JAOO Conference - for developers by developers" - I looked up Microsoft TechEd and expected to find some similar subtitle and TechEd is mainly for developers as I can see it - developing Microsoft products of course. I would love one day to attend TechEd but I have this odd feeling that it is more of a commercial event where you get a pair of baggy 10$ sandcoloured pants, a pair of ugly glasses, a blue shirt plus a Beatles-haircut and suddenly you have 15.000 Bill Gates-look-a-likes wandering around praising a single technology. Maybe it is just a good, ol' prejustice and I would love if I was wrong about this one... Which is one of the reasons it could be fun to attend TechEd just to be able to go home and tell other people with similar prejustices that they should go as well.

JAOO markets themselves as being an agile conference and the technologies and methodologies presented on the tracks are more Java and Ruby-ish than they are Microsoft. JAOO does however have presentations where you get an insight into the .NET Technology and they are also able to invite a Microsoft stars such as Anders Hejlsberg and Eric Meijer to come and tell a story or two about LINQ.

The hosts and presenters of the tracks are not the primary ressource I believe - it is the people attending who will make the conference to whatever it will look like in retrospective. I am looking forward to sit down, get to learn new stuff and perhaps talk to people about agile stuff and what each of us are working on. If you are going (what are the odds? But anyway...) drop a note and tell me what you think and what you were able to take with you :o)