Maarten van Stam - Soft As In Software :-) : DevDays

Geek Night is behind us, tomorrow DevDays part 2

maarten — Thu, 22 May 2008 23:21:00 GMT

Today DevDays part 1 and Geek Night took place. The DevDays event is really getting bigger over the years. I heard someone say in a video that it was a 'mini-TechEd' and I think he was right.

The amount of sponsor stands is huge this year. Everywhere you look there are stands doing business and handing out swag. Sadly enough I don't have time to collect swag items :-) I run from session to session learning great things, boy there are so many technologies out in the open right now that it is almost impossible to keep up with all these things.

My main focus still is VSTO and Office Development (Wouter van Vugt is doing some sessions in that area) so that is the area of my expertise and I am able to keep ahead of things there. But you must be aware of all the other technologies that crawl into your expertise area. A couple of technologies that you hit when developing Office applications:

- Silverlight
- WPF
- WCF
- C#, Linq, new features
- Same goes for VB.NET
- Entity Framework
- SQL Compact
- etc etc

There just ain't enough hours in a day to keep up!

Tomorrow: DevDays 2008 - Amsterdam

maarten — Wed, 21 May 2008 20:20:00 GMT

Tomorrow (May 22) and Friday (May 23) DevDays 2008 is hosted in the RAI, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Two days of technical developer sessions and a Geek Night in between. The DevDays event is an event where you get two days packed with sessions and other presentations the latest news on Microsoft technologies and developments in that area.

There will be some great presenters there at your service. How about Ingo Rammer doing his famous debugging sessions, Rafal Lukawiecki who is always capable explaining highly technical information in a clear way.

I noticed that one of my teachers, Ron Tolido - he was teaching C++ when I was studying for my BSc CS a loooooooooong time ago - is doing a presentation on social networks development as you can experience in sites such as FaceBook, LinkedIn, MySpace or Hyves (that's a very popular Dutch social network where almost every Dutch student virtually resides)

The event in between, Geek Night (Geeks Only), special interest groups will show things on XNA Game, Flightsim and Robotics Development and there is the Coding4Fun sessions showing things such as PopFly technologies.

I'll be there to learn some things (yes, I have to do some learning too. Never pretend to think you know everything!) and meet some peers. Are you going? Don't hesitate to pull my shirt (carefully) and have a talk if you want. I'm sure you too have interesting things to talk about.

Surprise presentation at DevDays 2007 NL

maarten — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:29:00 GMT

Today I went to DevDays 2007 here in Amsterdam, the Netherlands where I live to meet Mike Hernandez and talk to him some more about VSTO. Mike was scheduled to do three presentations at the Dutch DevDays 2007 conference:

For the second session (all descriptions on the links are in Dutch) Mike unexpectedly asked me to make his second presentation a duo presentation where I could show the audience the improvements that will arrive in Visual Studio 2008 (AKA Orcas) on the topic of VSTOs SharePoint Workflow implementation Visual Studio 2008.

I had to check my 'demo' notebook (I bought myself a brand new Dell Inspiron for the purpose of doing presentations and prototyping in Virtual PCs) to see if I had my workflow presentation available.

I found my workflow presentation where I show a comparison between SharePoint Workflow in Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 using the VSTO features and took that last part from that presentation where I show the workflow implementation Visual Studio 2008.

I felt that I was really pushing my luck today:

Unprepared presentation
Did not bring my notebook battery (borrowed one from the preceding speaker Alex Thissen - thanks for that!)
Tried to do it in English to keep the session recording completely in one language
The date for the presentation was the 13th :-S

So there I was up on stage with Mike Hernandez from the US VSTO team, and me in the role of 'SME' (Subject Matter Expert) to show of my SharePoint Workflow 'skills'.

The presentation turned out ok, the demos worked as they should work, even though using the Beta1 version for Visual Studio 2008. That version is most likely to break as it is nowhere near final, but we pulled it off.

Thursday I will celebrate my daughters birthday before she is going to school, try to catch the third session from Mike and maybe a few other sessions and then get back home for the rest of the birthday celebration when she is returned from school. When all the birthday guests returned to their homes i'll do some work on running projects that I have to finish for my daily job. Work goes on ... no holding back there. Busy busy busy... I hardly get any sleep the last few weeks.