An inspiring DevDays 2011

Together with colleague Ivo I visited the Microsoft DevDays 2011, held in the World Forum in The Hague on the 28^th and 29^th of April.

DevDays is on of the bigger Microsoft conventions about software development and architecture, offering a broad range of topics on various platforms such as Azure, desktop/client, SQL Server, Visual Studio, .Net and Windows phone 7.

For us, these 2 days were a great opportunity to gather new ideas, think out the box, check the level of our skillset, and last but not least: enjoy great lunches, accompanied by cute DevDays lunch-girls .

Day 1 began with the Microsoft DevDays Keynote, giving an overview of what developers have accomplished in the field of webdevelopment and cloud technology over the past few years.

The best part for me was Scott Hanselman showing how development tools and coding like ASP classic have evolved to the tools and technology we use today.

The keynote got us really excited about 2 days of learning. In which we had plenty of choice: 5 slots each day, with around 10 different sessions in each slot!

We visited a few sessions that were interesting to the both of us, like MVC 3 101 by Scott Hanselman. ASPN.NET MVC is a powerful, pattern-based tool for building dynamic websites in an agile manner. It contains a lot of functionalities that speed up development time in various way.

Ivo mostly focussed on the sessions about .Net development and optimization and effective usage of code and architecture. What stood out for him was the session Declarative Refactoring in C#, in which Chris Eargle spoke about using C# in it’s full potential, using functionality where it belongs and improving (future) code-readability.

I was personally mostly into the SQL sessions: while most developer conventions are about .Net development, DevDays offered a few seminars focussed solely on databases, database technique, database development and so on. Apart from these sessions, the MVC 3 and Razor sessions sparked my interest.

Of the SQL sessions I visited I enjoyed Full text Search in SQL Server 2008 and Denali and SQL Server Performance: Query Plans the best. The full text search session pretty much confirmed that the way we develop and use various techniques are ‘right’, so to speak. Which is obviously a great feeling to have during such a session . Of course there’s still enough left to learn, and new tools to discover, such as the new SQL Denali.

Something else being discussed was IFilters, a technique that makes it possible to search for file attributes within varbinary-saved objects, using full text search. This for example makes it possible to extract the GPS location from a binary-saved photo (shot with a Windows 7 phone or iPhone) in a database.

Another recommendation is the SQL Server Performance session. This session focused on optimizing and improving queries and the underlying functionalities like JOINS, nested and merged loops, Index Lookups, etcetera. Something we’ve been working on ourselves in recent projects. The session also covered in detail how a query is executed in SQL Server.

We attended our last session together: How Smart Use Cases Can Drive Web Development, by Sander Hoogendoorn, a great speaker who’s sessions we’ve attended before on SDN events. It was an inspiring final session and we will definitely start using smart use cases ourselves soon!

During the DevDays there were a lot of outsourcers looking for developers, offering all kinds of freebies such as ice-cream, t-shirts, the possibility to win a vacation, and so on. We really enjoyed these, although, since we were were wearing badges with our personal details on it, like everyone at the conference, we do hope our spam filter will be able to block all of the offers we are about to receive!

Happy coding!