WitwickiTech.com

For the last couple days, Winnipeg has been home to the last stop for the Canadian tour of the Microsoft Tech Days 2009. I spent the first day in the Purple Port track sessions on Collaboration. Since I work almost exclusively with SharePoint in my job, I thought this would be a good idea. On the second day, I attended the sessions in the Orange track on Microsoft development.

First I’ll address the SharePoint stuff. For the most part, the sessions were a complete waste of my time. Now it’s not that they weren’t any good and I did pick up some marginally useful stuff in one of the sessions on Versioning and Upgrades but overall, the content was pretty basic for me. That said, I think most of the attendees saw some value judging by the questions being asked. Maybe my perspective is skewed but I was expecting the topics to be a little more technical.

On the development side, things were much better. Although I am vaguely familiar with the topics covered (ASP.NET MVC, SOLID and REST), I am by no means well versed in these areas and I found the presentations to be much more informative. In particular, I really enjoyed David Wesst’s presentation on Building RESTful Services with WCF. Not only was the content good, Wessty was rather entertaining.

It wasn’t all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows though. Pretty much every demo had “issues”. I’m sure the problems had a variety of causes but I know when I do demos at work, I’ve been able to plan ahead enough that I can deal with most problems without resorting to fumbling around trying to get it going. At any rate, some of the presenters were better at smoothing this over than others and that helped.

Overall, the event was very well run and the event staff were both friendly and helpful. The meals were decent except for the coffee (which was pretty bad) and the rooms were suitably comfortable. One thing I found particularly impressive was the use of Twitter. For the most part, the only people tweeting were the presenters but I had tweeted about being disappointed with the first session I had attended and one of the presenters replied asking if there was anything he could do to help. How awesome is that?!? This was definitely a worthwhile event to attend and a couple days out of the office is always nice (although I dread the thought of what I’m coming back to). When this rolls around next year, I highly recommend attending.

- Dave