Tom's MSDN Belux Corner

Looking Back At The Belgian Developer & IT Pro Days 2007

Last week, from 27 till 29 March, we had our annual Developer & IT Pro Days conference. According to the attendee feedback and the attending partners, it was the best one ever. The ratings that were given are truly amazing. Here are a few general facts about the conference:

• More than 1.350 registrations
• More than 35 sessions exclusively for software developers
• An architecture track with Ron Jacobs
• 8 parallel break-outs
• 2 pre-conference tracks
• First public demo of the latest PLINQ bits by Raj Pai

Some less obvious facts:

• At least 45 people were working in the background to make the conference a success from Monday 26 March till Thursday night 29 March
• 6.500 minutes of sessions were recorded (pre-conferences were not recorded)
• The technical teams needed 3 trailers to transport all their equipment.
• +1.000 meters of category 5 UTP cable for the internet connections
• +250 kilo's of t-shirts
• 8.500 liters of water and soft drinks (that is almost 3 liters per person per day!), thirsty anyone?
• 10.000 sandwiches, hungry anyone?

A few blog posts about the Developer & IT Pro Days:

• Our BeLux Regional Director, Gregory "Redo" Renard, and his team did a couple of interviews (some in English, some in French):
  • Arlindo Alves, IT Pro Evangelist at Microsoft Belgium & Luxembourg
  • Jelle Druyts, consultant at Compuware Belgium and since a few days consultant at Microsoft Belgium & Luxembourg
  • Benoît Fortemps, partner technology and solution advisor at Microsoft Luxembourg
  • The WygTeam at Developer & IT Pro Days
• Gill Cleeren blogged his final verdict and posted several of his photos online.
• Bruno Lowagie, creator of iText, came to the conference to see more about WPF, XAML, XPS and Open XML.
• Bart Bultinck gave an overview from his IT Pro perspective (TechNet tracks).
• Maarten Balliauw is exhausted after 2 days of the conference.
• Tim Van Wassenhove was not really amused by a jokes from the speaker during the closing keynote.
• Jeff Prosise likes Ghent.
• Everyone has an opinion on the conference, even our photographer...
• Julien bought an XBox 360 after playing on one at the Developer & IT Pro Days. Got to let the XBox marketeers know this. <grin>
• Yves Hanoulle could only attend 1 day of the conference; he talks about the good and bad he saw.
• Jan Van Ryswyck writes about his pre-conference experience and the 2 days main conference.
• Sven saw a lot of geeks at the conference. Yes!
• The SQL Server User Group blogged about their exclusive member talk with Bob Beauchemin.
• Sven Cipido wraps up his experience.
• The people of the N-Technologies group at Ordina created a subsite with pictures of their participation at the conference.
• Steven Van de Craen was one of our Community VIP's at the conference.
• Kris Van der Mast - brand new MVP since a few days - blogs about the preconference and main conference.
• One of our MSP's (Microsoft Student Partners) blogged about day 1, day 2 and day 3.

Here are already a few pictures of the conference, taken by our photographer Ine Dehandschutter. More photos will follow later:

Going to the keynote area...


A few minutes later at another entrance to the keynote area...


Opening keynote by David Chappell


Developer & IT Pro Days is also about making friends and meeting people with the same interest


Full rooms at several break out sessions