One of those [Dev]Days
Four days since the first developer days e.g. DevDays 2008 event happened, and i still don't see any reaction in our (small but growing) .net community. No blog post, forum opinion, nothing. One can get impression that event like this never happened.
And i am, on the other hand, still under strong impressions. I'm very enthusiastic about the whole .net user group/community organization. Gatherings, discussions, presentations, workshops, with one word - communication, (ok, 4 words) exchange of ideas, is something that push the whole industry forward. And i will always support this type of activities.
If i need to express my oppinion on this event with one word only, i would choose this one: Surprise!
Yes, i was surprised, and not just once, but throughout the whole process. Let me explain this a little bit:
1. Announcement
I check for news and activities at mkdot.net site quite often. And i was pleasantly surprised when i discovered DevDays 2008!. I registered immediately, without any hesitation. The fact that microsoft was the organizer of the event along with the eminent presenters from Croatia got me even more thrilled.
All in all - A very pleasant surprise!
2. The Event
After the quick and simple check in, short and fine key note, the real event started.
The first presenter was Tomislav Bronzin, vice president of ineta europe, and regional microsoft director for South Eastern Europe. Beside those two, he had a lot of other titles, MVP as the most appealing one.
And when he started his presentation about WPF, VS 2008 Blend and other related tools and technologies - i was again surprised. I felt that his presentation wasn't aimed to us developers, but for little children instead. To discuss about buttons and properties, to repeat that focus is not on the scenario - but on tools, to give us tips and tricks on how restarting VS can help your build process... I don't know. This is where i got confused. A lot!
From one side, i expected a lot more. I expected focus on technology it self. What problems does it solves, what are the benefits, foresights and downsides of it. Why those new technologies aren't used as much as they should (the whole workflow group was released more than two years ago).
Instead, we got presentations with rotating text boxes and pointless discussions about inconsistencies between Blend and VS 2008!
So it was natural to ask my self weather my expectations were too high, or am i way too serious about .net and stuff which are - see for yourself - soo simple and... simple. If you have any issues - just restart your VS. Everything will be solved with a blink of an eye.
And what was all that about pointing fingers on various bugs and glitches in the VS 2008/Blend. Does that have to do something with the application design and technology usage? Big deal if i cannot double click on a button in order to create wired code behind event handler. Is this one of the greatest achievements of .net developers? To forget about simple editing of files and coding by hand... only if intelisense is available, of course. Whithouth intelisense, technology which is used has no meaning to us. It's useless.
But look ma - i got intelisense for JavaScript! Now i can introduce the great return of the JavaScript in web based technologies. Cause i got intelisense!!! Or split view! Wow - that was a direct hit. Now we can have split view as dreamveawer user have. Disappointing.
The next presenter was Dobrisa Adamec - ineta country leader for Croatia. His Silverlight introduction somehow lost the point when he tried to import XAML file previously created by Tomislav in his WPF example. He started replacing some of the incompatible tags and... decided that this is bad idea and opened another project with already prepared look alike example! So much for Silverlight.
Next we saw a short presentation about testing which seemed more interesting, especially the load testing primer. The presenter didn't left the impression that he's familiar with the unit testing concept well, but i might be wrong, didn't payed too much attention cause i was too sleepy. Why, cause it was damn boring.
And last and final presentation was about Team Foundation System. I wanted to ask the presenter weather they used some other PM system before TFS - but felt like i will be damned by the 80% of the audience if i prolong this event even for a second. Anyway, it is good to see that microsoft is working in the area of CI and other software life cycle aspects, but developers must not forget that there are dozen of other useful and excellent tools which are widely accepted and used.
3. Organization
I have only one big remark on organization. Lack of Wi-Fi access. Although there were couple of wireless networks available, the organizer was not able to provide us with stable connection. Even the presenters were using GPRSmodules for access on their notebooks. I was assuming that Wi-Fi is something very common and natural to expect, especially on such events.
I cannot think of any good conclusion that can finish this post. I can only hope that next events will be more productive and motivating than this one. After all, the first ones are thrown into the river - aren't they?