Earlier this week I was fortunate enough to get a day off of work to attend the Microsoft Security Summit in St. Louis, MO. It was my first technical convention, though I don't know if it really counts since it was only a day and free, but hey, it was good to see that St. Louis has some other developers. I often feel rather isolated at my company since I'm currently the only developer.
If you've never been to one of these events, you start off with a keynote speech, where they announced the new Microsoft Update, which will replace Windows Update as a central location to update all Microsoft products, but thats probably old news for most of you.
There were 3 tracks, 2 IT and one developer. You could mix and match I suppose (there was nothing stopping you from attending whatever tracks you wanted), but I stuck with the developer tract all day, ignoring the ask-the-experts session at the end of the day in favor of a .Net specific session. The sessions started a little slow and generic, but moved into more specific and practical examples later and I got plenty of new information.
If you have a chance to go, I'd recommend it, especially if you are into IT or development, there was a lot of good information and the price is right. If you can't go, you can get most of the content via downloadable webcasts at http://www.microsoft.com/seminar/securitysummit/default.mspx.