It was a great week at Techdays, even if it was a tiresome one. My first big event as a Developer Evangelist at Microsoft, so the first one I got to see the backstage of all of it.
Delivering technical sessions is something I really love to do, so I usually put a lot of effort into it and this case wasn’t an exception. Fortunately, the lack of sleep and very long business days payed off, as I received excellent feedback from all the attendees and had very crowded rooms throughout my 3 sessions.
My 3 sessions were:
- ASP.NET MVC 2 – a session done with absolutely no slides, just startup Visual Studio 2010 and start developing an application, explaining the MVC philosophy and showing off the developer experience. Achieved a 8.31 overall score and 8.50 on speaker evaluation. Ranked 4th best session of all Techdays.
- Visual Studio 2010: Advanced Diagnostics, Intellitrace & Test Automation – session around some of the new cool debugging features of VS 2010, showing off demos of Intellitrace, Test Impact analysis, Multi-Tier Performance Analysis and Crash Dump analysis, all inside Visual Studio. Achieved a 8.39 overall score and 8.54 on speaker evaluation. Ranked 2nd best session of all Techdays. Download PPT.
- ASP.NET MVC “Debaixo de Fogo” (Under Fire) – session about security features in ASP.NET MVC and showing off a few examples of well-known hacker attacks, how they are built and how we can protect our applications against it. Again, a session done with no slides at all. Achieved a 8.51 overall score and 8.68 on speaker evaluation. Ranked 1st best session of all Techdays.
I thoroughly enjoyed delivering these 3 sessions and getting to know the people that attended them. I got some very interesting questions and even more interesting discussions around technology, Microsoft vision and how we fare against competition. Networking and sharing experiences is one of the most important aspects of an event such as this one, where you get the chance of stepping outside your own box and see what else is out there, what are other people doing, what problems are they having and how they solve them…
Besides my 3 “main” sessions, I had the opportunity to deliver a 5 minute demo at the Keynote, showing off some of the ALM features in Visual Studio 2010 and I was literally dragged without any sort of preparation to a discussion panel about web development technologies, along with Luis Martins, Caio Proiete and Nuno Godinho. We essentially made a quick and informal session that gathered a lot of interest as the “room” (if you were there, you’ll understand the quotes) was packed with people wanting to know the answer to a simple question: “With so many technologies to choose from, what should I use?”.
Overall, the event went great even if it wasn’t exactly what we had envisioned…but the most important aspect – the content – was very good and we could feel the excitement in the attendees and speakers alike.
Here is a simple Photosynth that one of my colleagues made at the venue: http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=b273984a-ff1b-4577-84cf-97ce229cf17c
Hope you enjoyed it. If you attended my sessions, feel free to leave me comments on this post or send me an email with your feedback, questions or suggestions.