TechDays 2012: speaking & visiting

14. February 2012 23:37

This year at DevDays, I will be doing a presentation on building microsites using Orchard CMS and running them on Windows Azure. How is that for a lot of product names and concepts in one sentence? Orchard CMS is an open source content management system that is backed by Microsoft. It is built using contemporary .NET features and is highly extensible, as you will find out if you visit my session. Besides me, there will be a lot of Avanade colleagues presenting as well: Geert van der Cruijsen, Jesse Houwing, Mirjam van Olst and many more.

 

A quick list of some of the sessions I am looking forward to:

 

  • 11:05 - 12:20: a couple of options. "Rocking the enterprise with the Kinect" might be interesting since we have a couple of interns at Avanade that are doing great stuff with Kinect... but the intro to WinRT by Bart de Smet might be cool too: Bart is a very very smart guy, his sessions are always insightful.
  • 13:30 - 14:45: Deep dive into Metro, even though the Gu is on stage at the same time. Seen the "how to get up & running with Azure" often enough, I suppose.
  • 15:05 - 16:20: This time, going to the MVC4 session by the Gu. I mean: he is here, in the Netherlands, must see at least one session.
  • 16:30 - 17:45: A lot to choose from. The session on the SharePoint Developer Dashboard by Gustavo Velez should be cool (listed as a level 400 but from experience I can tell you it will feel like a 700... at least). The session by Steve Sanderson on single page apps should be interesting too, though.

 

After that: Geeknight. Must go & see Rob Miles if only for entertainment value, other than that I will go with whatever I feel like. On Day 2:

 

  • 09:15 - 10:30: I will probably go and see Astrid Hackenberg talk about multi tenant Azure apps. On the other hand, I might opt for unknown territory and go and see Beth Massi on the advanced bits of Lightswitch.
  • 10:50 - 12:05: I have not made up my mind yet, might actually go and try out some of my own code demo's during this slot.
  • 13:15 - 14:30: Steve Sanderson on async web apps and MVC4 might be good, but Geert's session on push tiles in Phone 7 should be nice too.
  • 14:50 - 16:05: Looking forward to seeing things I did know you could do with Windows Azure in the session by Nick Harris.
  • 16:15 - 17:30: my own session on Orchard, Azure and microsites. Should probably go there.

 

There is a TechDays NL app in the Windows Phone 7 marketplace; grab it to browse al the available sessions and mark your personal favorites. If you happen to be bringing another device to the event, visit http://m.techdays.nl/ for the session information.