I was fortunate enough to attend Microsoft’s MIX conference for the first time this year. I learned a ton, jotted down hundreds of ideas for my projects, and had some valuable discussions with a lot of smart people.
Obviously you have to attend in person to network, but fortunately all the videos and slides are being made available online. Even for attendees this is great for review, but also because you inevitably miss a ton of sessions because of the schedule.
At the very end, I attended a great session by the co-founder and developer of Agile Zen, Nate Kohari. It’s a unique project management web app written in ASP.NET MVC 2 and jQuery.