Today I attended DevDays 2009. I’m am still relatively new to the whole Microsoft Development sphere and found the keynote quite intriging and a good summary of new and latest trends and technologies.
Firstly, the venue I think was very original, it was themed around “Cinema” . The venue was the Nu Metro in Monte Casino. We had 3 cinema halls dedicated to us, with the main one having the most comfortable movie seats I’ve even sat on.
On arrival we received the standard coffee and cookies and started chatting with some of the other developers around, and actually met some old friends which I’ve not seen in a while.
After the keynote you had an option to go to one of 3 tracks(rooms) for every session(which there were 4 for the day).
After the keynote, for the first session I attended the “Practical LINQ” session presented by Eben de Wit. My main reason being that I had to choose between WPF Demystified,Practical LINQ and Blasting off with PHP and IIS, and as I know the standard stuff about PHP on IIS and WPF not really my domain and I’m more focused on data driven systems, I chose the LinQ session.
Eben gave a good summary of the LINQ features and also a very quick ‘n easy demo to get the message across, also, with the real life example, Comair(The Captain was there) aircraft traffic system(don’t know if that is a good summary) that used LINQ and they apparently had great success and by using LINQ they claimed they had good performance increases on some Stored Procedures.
For my second session, I attend “Developing Solutions with Sharepoint” presented by Hilton Giesenow from 3fifteen, which I think was a very well prepared presentation with good content, would have loved to hear more, but we ran out of time. Although I knew everything Hilton talked about, it is nice to see such professional presentaitons by South African techies and makes one just excited about the product again.
Lunch…. I was a bit dissapointed about the lunch. Each person received a “Lunchbox” with an Apple, Tex,Sandwich and Chips, which I don’t think was that cool, o yes, don’t forget the coke. At least it was filling and filled the gap for a little while.
During lunch I did not go to a Lunch Box Session, although I would have liked to have gone to the session “Gaming with Microsoft XNA Game Studio”, although I think all attendees went to this session 😉 (everybody wants to be a game developer)
The next session was quite boring for me and was not very relevant for me. We then attended the Closing Keynote at around 16h30 the afternoon, with as the slide said “Demos, demos …. and more demos” which was quite nice to see developers in action. Here I also saw the new Testing tools coming from Microsoft and a nice illustration of the new features of Visual Studio 2010.
To summarize, New User Group, new ideas, great and some weird people and general good experience and some great technologies experienced. Although this event was not as awesome as some of the other Microsoft conferences I’ve been to, I will definitely attend next year again, I rreckon the TechEd is going to be awesome though!