DevReach 2008 - Two Thumbs Up!
I attended the conference for the first time this year - and I liked it!
The conference:
What impressed me the most was a noticeable shift toward Agile methodologies, in particular TDD. Although such intention was first promoted with VS 2005 Team System (MSF Agile Pack comes to my mind) this is the time where these paradigms are finally put on table and available to all developers in the .net world.
There were three presentations addressing TDD, several of them discussing application design and one or two even explaining what Agile methodology is and how to adopt it (The Daily Scrum ) .
What I liked the most were the two presentations by Steve Smith named "Pragmatic ASP.NET Tips, Tricks (And Tools) (Part 1 & 2)". The reason for this: they came to me at the time when I was dwelling into the topic of optimization and performance improvement my self. From that perspective - those two presentations gave me the most valuable information. Steven held another presentation tightly related with the first two - "ASP.NET Performance and Scaling" but I didn't get to this one - it was at the same time with the most visited presentations of all: Fun with HTTP Handlers (and Security) by Miguel Castro who I think was the star of the conference.
What I missed watching was a Q&A Panel organized by .Net Rocks host Carl Franklin. The topic was How Will Web Development Be Done Next? , and according to the attendees it was great. I hope Carl with put it on site soon so I can listen to it.
The reason for missing one of my favorite podcasts (this is where I've heard about DevReach in the first place) is cause at the same time I attended a presentation on Castle Project - "The Castle Project - Open Source Kick-Ass MVC/ORM/IoC Framework" by Branimir Giurov.
I was very enthusiastic about the presentation, but it left me somehow disappointed. Why?
I think that the presenter somehow missed the momentum. In the period where ASP.NET MVC is gaining more and more interest I needed some points and reasons why should I choose Castle over MVC. Instead, we got an incomplete overview of Castle's features and frameworks (which has enough material for organizing conference on it's own). Anyway, kudos to Branimir for standing up and defending the Castle.
The organization:
It wasn't that easy to get to Sofia, but we made it! And hey - it was fun. You can see it for yourself :)
The conference was well organized, with lots of food, snacks and drinks. I liked the live streaming rooms where it was possible to virtually attend some of the presentations where all seats were taken or the space was simply too small to get everyone - great idea.
What I disliked - the official site. Although nicely designed and well organized - it lacked two (crucial) functions which are a must for such sites: search and update. It was not possible to search either for presenters or presentations or .. anything. And last, i would like to see such sites update their content regularly along with notifications for changes on scheduled presentations as well as for overall information about the conference and everything around it. Hope to see this better organized next year.
See you at DevReach 2009!