This will be the first year InsideRIA's been around to cover the Adobe MAX conference.
The bad news is that Rich Tretola won't be with us at MAX. That said, we'll miss him, and do what we can to soldier on.…

Saturday afternoon I'll be on marketing support, doing what I can to help the conference bookstore people as they get set up, making sure (knock wood) all of the O'Reilly books got there and that they get stocked and set up okay. There'll be copies of all the Adobe Developer Library books available, sure, but also lots of titles on other RIA topics, including recent and extremely popular titles like Dojo: The Definitive Guide and JavaScript: the Good Parts. The conference bookstore is on the second level of Moscone West, and is open from 7am-7pm Sunday-Tuesday and 7am-3pm Wednesday. (Apologies to the Flying Logo Sisters Bookstore if I got any of those times wrong...)

If you're an educator or know someone who is and who'll be at the show, on Sunday InsideRIA will be at an all-day pre-con for educators at the Adobe offices on Townsend Street, followed by a reception for educators at the Marriott (near Moscone), from 6-8pm (it's at a place called The Atrium inside the hotel). Stop by and see us; I'd love to talk with you about how you're teaching--or want to teach--RIA development, design, and thought.

Monday morning at 9:30 is the keynote: Expect several interesting announcements; Adobe gave Rich and me a briefing on Thursday afternoon; we wish we could tell you all about it, but stay tuned: Rich has a briefing coming your way as soon as it's legal to do so (s/b Monday @ 12:01am ET).

At 11:30am, we'll be at the Adobe session "Aligning Higher Education with RIA Trends and Opportunities", led by Adobe's Anuja Dharkar. Again, if you're a teacher, trainer or administrator, we hope to see you there. We're in the process of working with Adobe to expand our collective reach… out to the people who are training the first generation of classroom-educated RIA developers. This isn’t about specific technologies, this is much more about what the fundamental concepts are, and how they should be taught.

At 12:30pm on Monday the expo floor opens (call it the Community Pavilion). O'Reilly will be there, so come by for a chat. Community Pavilion hours are Monday, 12:30-5:30, Tuesday, noon-5pm, and Wednesday, noon-3pm.

Monday, 2 p.m. is the first of the three O'Reilly Camp sessions, "The Flex Architecture Faceoff". It's an hour-long panel discussion among Chafic Kazoun (*Programming Flex 3*), Joshua Noble and Todd Anderson (*Flex 3 Cookbook*), Yakov Fain (blogger, managing director at Farata Sytems, and co-author of an upcoming book on enterprise app development with Flex, w/Adobe Developer Library), and… the audience, which is nearly full: most of the 375 slots are spoken for. Get there early….

Monday evening is the conference reception, at the Community Pavilion, from 6:30-8:30; stop by for drinks and a bit of celebration at the O'Reilly booth. Can't tell you why yet, since it jibes with something that may be announced this week. But it's definitely worth celebrating…

Tuesday, from noon-1:00 pm, the conference bookstore will have an Adobe Developer Library author book-signing. Stop by; meet smart people who are also incredibly clever and engaging, and ask them any damn thing you want.

Wednesday we've got two more O'Reilly sessions.
The big one, if you follow InsideRIA, is, well, the InsideRIA session: "InsideRIA Outlook, 2009: What Every Developer Needs to Be Thinking About" , from 11-noon. Come see InsideRIA regulars Andre Charland, Andrew Trice, RJ Owen, Adam Flater and Sean Christmann. We're nearly sold out on this one, too, so get there early….
The other one, equally as cool, but definitely schedule-challenged, is "Inside the Adobe AIR Cook-off: The Best Show Off Their Winning Chops". It's the beer session. Last one of the conference. Everyone else will be heading off to the airport of to nearby bars, except the 150-or-so people who have already signed up to attend this session, and I suspect we'll be full by starting time. Get a chance to see the AIR Cook-off winners show off their stuff, and to also get insight from Adobe AIR Cookbook authors Marco Casario and Koen de Weggheleire.

That's it for the formal agenda…. Everything else is catch-as-twitter-can. See you there, or at least via little bits.

More importanly, what are YOU doing at MAX? Let us know via comments.

--SCW, aka @steveweiss (Twitter) and @insideria

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