Looking back at the Dev&IT-Pro Days: Day One
I know it's a little bit late, it's already a week ago: Microsoft Developer & IT Pro Days 2004. It seems that everybody has already blogged the cool stuff (thanks Tom for the list), the Belgian .NET world is really starting to blog, I like that:
- David Cumps, it's a pitty I haven't met him, I've only met him “virtually“.
- Tom van de Kerkhof, Tom has a strange picture of me, was it on the DevDays or somewhere else? :-)
- Patrick Verbruggen, I met Patrick at the BENUG booth and he had some good news for his company.
- Tom Mertens, I haven't seen his presentation (sorry Tom), but I was told it was good.
- I've met Bart De Smet, but he hasn't blogged about it (yet).
- As always Patrick Tisseghem was there too to evangelize SharePoint and Office, but he hasn't blogged about this event (yet).
The day started quite early, I had to leave (together with Tom vdK and Raf) around 5:30 am to get in Ghent on time. Luckily there wasn't much traffic so everything went fine. The introduction of Bruno Segers (General Manager, Microsoft Belux) was short but funny, I remember two things: 1) developers are from another planet (that explains a lot!) 2) Microsoft promotes the replacement of waitresses by robots running on the .NET Framework (it was a cool demo, but I don't know if I'm in favor of that).
Then Steve Riley talked about Innovation through Integration and of course security. Steve's a really good and amusing speaker, but I agree with Patrick's remarks: the ActiveX Security Warning is not good enough for “normal” users. It will get better in SP2 for developers and IT-Pro's who know what's going on, but this won't help the Information Worker.
After a short break I attended Ingo Rammer's session about “Building Extensible Applications using Attributes, Reflection and Code Generation”. Although it was a level 300 session, I was a little bit disappointed: nothing really new. During the lunch David Boschmans talked about “Build .NET applications to last” besides Hippo.NET, David also mentioned some cool tools of his own company: Compuware.
Astrid Hackenberg presented a very good session about “SQL Server Reporting Services Uncovered”. Although it was “only level 200”, Astrid showed some impressive features of the product that's already available for a few weeks. Only one small problem: there are no report viewers yet to include in your Windows.Forms applications. :-( But of course there are some alternatives, make sure to read this one by Bryan Keller.
Then it was again Ingo Rammer who talked about “Web Services Wizardry with Web Services Extensions”. I think Ingo has done a really good job on this one: good content and a good message: Indigo will have a bunch of features that WSE brings you today, but be aware that if you use WSE the migration from web services to Indigo won't go as smooth as using default web services.
The last session of that day was brought by Patrick Tisseghem: “Communication & Collaboration: a developer's overview”. As always Patrick showed a lot of demos, and I actually learned something completly new for me: the Research Library of Office 2003. I always thought it was only something annyoing feature to quickly lookup something in Encarta if you've got it installed. But there's a complete extensibility model behind that feature, so you can easily provide your own information when a user uses Research.
The closing keynote was introduced by Gerd De Bruycker, he showed some videos of Longhorn: impressive and fun. Steve Riley finished off, it was a pitty there was quite some noise in the room. The Geek Fest following the closing keynote was a little bit disappointing: a lot of people left really early, guess there aren't a lot of real geeks in Belgium. Luckily our hotel was quite close to center of Ghent, so we went with a bunch of other guys (and a girl!) to a cafe called Pallieter. For more “information” about this side-event, check out this thread on the MS Belux Forums: it was great!