Tom's MSDN Belux Corner

Looking back at TechDays 2009 in Antwerp, Belgium

The Microsoft TechDays 2009 conference in Belgium was held from 10 till 12 March. A little more than 1.650 unique individuals came to Antwerp to attend one of 83 different sessions.

• Want to see how it looked like? Here are some pictures of TechDays 2009.
• Added 26 March 2009: And here is the TechDays 2009 compilation video.
• Quite some twitters about TechDays: both on the Belgian TechDays as well as all TechDays conferences around the world. Apparently more developers than administrators are twittering. @unexxx and @aralves are hoping connect with more IT pro’s on Twitter.
• Did you know a Microsoft team in Redmond is organizing a “Virtual TechDays around the World” on April 1st during 24 hours? Don’t expect the same experience as attending the local conferences, but they signed up quite some great speakers.
• Katrien posted some info of the Brussels Girl Geek Dinner @ TechDays side event.

Here are a few blog posts from attendees and speakers:

• Martijn Spelt posts in Dutch on the TechNet track
• Danny Zeegers post in Dutch about the SharePoint preconference session
• Unexpected posted several items in Dutch about the TechNet track
• Laurent Bugnion shares some thoughts on TechDays
• Paul Lorena writes about the ASP.NET MVC presentation
• @martius makes fun of the power outage in the entire Metropolis complex in Antwerp. Luckily it didn’t last too long.
• Virtual Ief gives a short overview of things he remembers from the TechNet track
• Alain Hufkens writes about the MSDN keynote at TechDays
• Tommy Carlier would like to see some sessions of TechDays posted Channel9
• Jeroen Budts came to TechDays for the first time. 
• Added 23 March 2009: Gill Cleeren explains “the road to the keynote”

At this point, most of the evaluations are in. We listen to our attendees:

• 95% wrote that their time at TechDays was (very) well spent;
• Attendees were happy with the content delivered – almost all sessions scored above our the required minimum score;
• Also about the food and drinks:
  • Quite some people found the sandwiches too fancy and prefer more simple food;
  • Developers and IT pro’s are hungry after attending sessions – the caterer obviously didn’t expect people were so hungry;
  • We definitely must make all the rest rooms easier to find;
  • Attendees don’t like to get their drinks in a glass instead of the bottles (unfortunately the caterer ran out of bottles and had to give drinks in glasses on Thursday afternoon
  • Last year a lot of people asked for healthy food (fruit) instead of cakes and cookies - apparently people want to have both cookies and fruit.
• Many people like the infrastructure of Metropolis and the location of the venue in Antwerp; some commented that they prefer Ghent as location for TechDays.