Microsoft DevDays 2009

The Dutch Microsoft DevDays conference is a traditional must-attend event for the Microsoft professional. This year’s edition -held on May 28^th and 29^th- returned to the World Forum in The Hague and I was fortunate to be part of it again. David Chappell gave a delightful keynote session on cloud computing, giving head start to over 80 in-depth sessions on a variety of the latest and greatest in Microsoft development technology. This year’s sessions mainly focused on Windows Azure, C# 4.0, Ajax 4.0, Silverlight 3, Visual Studio Team System 2010, and much, much more. Naturally, SharePoint 2007 was part of it, too. Amongst others, I joined the session covering building a social computing platform by Daniel McPherson, who gave a great mix of functional and technical insight into building scalable social applications. Jan Tielens gave an informative session on pimping up SharePoint sites using Web2.0 technologies (introducing the ‘Scale-of-Jan’ that grades the level of intrusion on deployment). A very interesting session on LINQ providers within SharePoint context was brought by Mirjam van Olst.

As always, I had a pretty tough time choosing which sessions to visit regarding the wide variety of multi-track sessions brought by well-known, highly regarded speakers from the industry. Fortunately, the sessions were recorded so I hope to be able to view those I missed soon. Besides all, the DevDays are always a good opportunity to rendezvous with fellow craftsmen and last but not least: hunt for goodies. I’m sure to be part of it next year!