Art Of Creation – Dynamics AX Blog » Recap: TechDays 2010 Antwerp

Hi again. Yesterday was day two of two of TechDays 2010 in Antwerp for me, and here are my findings. Read about day one here.

I attended following sessions:

UnKeynote – Lap Around .NET 4 by Scott Hanselman
Deepdive into Windows Azure by Sumit Mehrotra
How to make your blog suck less by Scott Hanselman
Visual Studio 2010 IDE Tips by Sarah Ford
What is new in WCF4 by Peter Himschoot

Same as the day before, I didn’t take any notes, so here’s what stuck in my head:

1. UnKeynote – Lap Around .NET 4 by Scott Hanselman

This session by Scott was more or less what Anders Hejlsberg talked about the day before (he even used some of the same demo’s), but he talked about it with so much passion that you weren’t bothered by that. Same as Anders, he talked about the ‘dynamic’ type that improves the interoperability between languages, the parallel processing and more. He’s such a good speaker that I decided to go to his session about blogging later that day.

2. Deepdive into Windows Azure by Sumit Mehrotra

I was totally new to Windows Azure [wiki] when I went to this session, but although it was a ‘deep dive’, I think the global idea about what Azure is got across just fine.

Basically, Microsoft has put data centers all over the world, and they have provided Azure as a service that you can subscribe to that deploys your applications on these servers. You don’t have to worry about setting up servers, making sure that the setup is redundant, that there is load balancing, etc, Azure does this for you. You just focus on creating applications so you have more time to create value for your customer, and then deploy them on the Azure “cloud”. From then on, if you want your application to be available on an other continent, if you want it to go faster, if you want to upgrade, etc, it’s just a few clicks away (and Benjamins from your bank account).

I find it a really interesting service, and you and your customers will probably benefit from Azure in the long run.

3. How to make your blog suck less by Scott Hanselman

A very interesting session by Scott for bloggers. In fact, so interesting that I will blog about it in a separate post later.

4. Visual Studio 2010 IDE Tips by Sarah Ford

This session was fun, but kind of trivial, although I can imagine some tips being helpful when you’re working with Visual Studio all day. If you’re a .NET developer, you can check out her website, she has all tips and tricks over there as well.

Note: This was the only session I was planing on taking notes, but she specifically said not to do that, because everything is already on her website. Nice.

5. What is new in WCF4 by Peter Himschoot

Although I don’t know a lot about WCF (only basic stuff about web services and SOA), I found this session interesting because I have been working with AIF lately. Although AIF takes care of all the WCF stuff, it’s handy to know how WCF works in case something goes wrong.