Dev Days 2007 review
I think it’s disgusting that when a large, fun event is just down the road from my house that I had to get up an hour earlier to attend it! This year’s Microsoft Dev Days event was at Vodaworld in Midrand and about 2km from my home.
The event was fun to attend and the sessions, particularly the Key Note, were informative and excitement inducing. I attended Peter Willmot’s talk on Windows Sharepoint Services for Developers and Client-side Development with Office before lunch; and later, the first part of What’s new in “Oracs” by Ahmed Salijee before switching tracks to Eben De Wit’s IIS 7 Developer End-to-end Overview.
It was really encouraging to see so many old faces (which I only ever seem to meet at Dev Days) and to meet a tonne of new people. SA Developer .NET was well promoted by the Microsoft staff and I was practically mobbed after the Key Note because the leaders of the community had Mobile SDK toolkits to hand out. The community also managed to put a pamphlet describing the community and with a link to our website into the packs that the attendees received when they registered and hopefully this’ll turn into some new members on the site and at sessions.
The most interesting talk for me was Peter’s Office Development session because at one point he went into depth about the ideology behind the new files that office uses which are really cabinet files (think .zip files) containing separate files for the data, styles and relationships to other data. Importantly they have a schema type file tells you where and what the other files are, allowing it to be dynamic. I think this is a marvellous way of transporting large chunks of different data in a format which an end user can understand and use in a Open Dialog/Save Dialog way, and with the help of System.IO.Packaging (new to .NET 3.0) it’s easy for developers to work with.
After the event was over a bunch of us headed off to the Dros nearby for a pint and a chat about the day. Armand du Plessis and I got talking about dynamic languages and he told me about a new blog he’s starting focused on Ruby (more on that when it’s up). He’s also offered to come and give a talk to SA Developer .NET on Ruby on Rails which I immediately accepted.
All in all it was a worthwhile going to the event and I look forward to next year!
[…] or Windows part, which everyone is blogging about and was recently demoed by Microsoft at Dev Days 2007. But there’s also an underlying, far more important part which, I think, will make busi […]