For the last half a year a group of us (Bil, James, Dave, Terry, Justice, Greg and Kyle) have been organizing the first ALT.NET conference in Canada and today, on Canada Day no less, we are announcing the opening of registration to it. The event will happen on August 15-17 in Calgary.

If you’ve not been to, or heard about, the ALT.NET conferences in Austin and Seattle, they have drawn many software development luminaries and created great conversations. There are no predefined sessions like you would normally find at a conference. The format follows the Open Spaces principle and is completely self organizing. The topics, conveners and session attendees happen based on the needs of the day, hour or minute. One of the most fantastic things about the conference is that conversations don’t stop after an hour. They will carry on in the halls, cab rides, restaurants, and most definitely in hotel lounges.

You can sign up here (http://www.altnetconfcanada.com/registration/index.castle) and review the current attendee list here (http://www.altnetconfcanada.com/participant/index.castle). Note that the conference is capped at 100 registrants, so signup fast. If you don’t get into that list, sign up anyways to ensure that you’re on the waitlist when people start cancelling.

Big shout out to the sponsors that we have so far: Thoughtworks, Solidhouse, CodeBetter and MSDN Canada.

I personally guarantee that one of the two Canadian delicacies you see here will be available in abundance at your hotel breakfast during the conference. You’ll just have to wait to see which one.