As I was invited as a speaker, I flew to Las Vegas for Penton’s IT/DEV Connections 2015, last week.

On my way to Las Vegas on Saturday, I decided to have a 5-hour lay-over in Minneapolis and Saint Paul (MSP) in Minnesota. I used this time to meet up with the former MVP Lead for Benelux and Nordics, William Jansen, visit his place and enjoy the local Reuben at Cecil’s Deli.

After my second flight, I landed on Las Vegas McCarran Airport (LAS) in Nevada, where I met with Maarten Goet, my colleague and roommate for the coming week at the Aria Resort and Casino.

The next day, IT/DEV Connections hadn’t started yet, so we had some time to kill. Together with Alex Hendrikse, Maarten and I went to Battlefield Vegas, where we visited their outdoor playground and practiced with some weapons on their indoor shooting range.

After we were dropped off by one of the Battlefield Vegas guys in an Humvee, we sat by the pool in the sun for a while and then visited downtown Las Vegas.

After our visit to Downtown Las Vegas, we went to the Fashion Show Mall to visit the Microsoft and Apple stores. After a walk up and down the strip with Kevin Buijs, I went to bed early.

Of course, the next day was mostly filled with preparing for the presentations. My Web Application Proxy mysteriously broke its trust relationship with its AD FS Server, but that was the least of my problems. After spending a couple of hours in the speaking lounge, I also spent some hours discovering Las Vegas.

On Wednesday, I delivered two sessions: my ‘Windows 10: Join the cloud!’ session on Azure AD Join in Windows 10 and the session I would initially co-present with Maarten, but I presented alone to accommodate Maarten to recover from a flu: ‘Azure Active Directory for Windows Server Active Directory Admins’.

Thursday marked the last day of IT/DEV Connections and Maarten and I were scheduled for some more sessions. I delivered my ‘Ask me Anything on Licensing Microsoft People-centric IT’ session and Maarten rocked Pinyon 6 together with Cameron Fuller and Dieter Wijckmans.

After these sessions, we enjoyed the sun at the pool at the Aria.

On Friday, I flew back to the Netherlands. Thinking back to this IT/DEV Connections adventure I feel truly blessed to be part of this community.

Cheers!