Microsoft TechDays 2011–Skopje, Macedonia

Microsoft TechDays 2011 was held at 18th of May 2011 in Skopje, Macedonia.

Here’s a short overview of the sessions:

1. Keynote, Karl Davies-Barrett

The keynote was held by Karl Davies-Barrett. We had a really interesting dive into the future applications development using Microsoft technologies. We saw really interesting concepts of what the future maybe look like.

2. Building Web Sites with Orchard, Hajan Selmani

I had the chance to work with Hajan on a project, and I must say that he is the one of the best .NET developers I know. From the things I saw I can definitely say that Orchard in not - “just another CMS”. Hajan showed how easily you can manage the web-site layout, modules, localization, create custom modules, widgets, zones, layers, parts, user and role management and many other stuff.

3. Building Business Applications with Visual Studio LightSwitch, Dejan Dimitrovski

I know Dejan for several years and he is definitely one of the best professionals worldwide. His knowledge in combination with LightSwitch is killer combination. He stunned the audience with the ability to develop applications with the speed of the light. In one session he managed to show many features of LightSwitch and build a complete working application.

4. Community Session – SharePoint 2010 Service Applications, Darko Milevski

I must admit that I am not very familiar with SharePoint. Besides that, Darko managed to hold my interest until the end of the session and even raise doubts about should I start learning SharePoint. He explained the idea that lies behind Service Applications and the architectural improvements in SharePoint.

5. Agile Development with Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010, Karl Davies-Barrett

After the great keynote I wasn’t even expecting something less from Karl. He was speaking about Scrum methodology and how VS 2010 and TFS 2010 can help us to manage the work. As he said – “It’s all about communication”. We can do amazing stuff with the sub versioning, tasks and teamwork, and all we have to do is jut use TFS.

6. Developing for Windows Phone 7 – End to End, Filip Kerazovski

My session was about developing applications in WP7. The technology that lies behind application development in WP7 is Silverlight. I managed to develop an application that uses MS Notification Service, talks to a WCF Service, uses the Task API and follows the MVVM pattern. And as I promised during the session, you can download the Source code from here.