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Stop 2: Amsterdam, Netherlands

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Bikes, lots of bikes. And trams too. Then there are also motorcycles, scooters, and cars. You better watch where you are walking while you are in Amsterdam!

That was my first impression of this spectacularly amazing and energetic city!

Jean-Marc and I arrived in Amsterdam to speak at DevDays. We spent a lot of time tweaking our session for this event because it is difficult to present the material we wanted to in the 70 minutes that we were given. Our session took over 2 hours in Brussels! But after several iterations, we cut TFS extensibility and shortened/combined a couple of demos and we hit the target time. We also spent several hours before the session preparing and discussing how we can make it more interactive and entertaining for the audience. We came up with a couple of ideas that we decided to try.

Our session was at the end of the first day, but over 220 of attendees packed into our session! We were very pleased by the attendance, and the audience were very responsive and engaged.

Overall, I was pretty happy with the session. It was definitely the most fun session that I have presented because of the way Jean-Marc and I interacted during the session. I especially appreciated his humor. Whenever he makes a small mistake, he would make a joke about the fact that he is French. The audience laughed out loud several times during the session. Also, there was a big round of applause when he completed his first demo. Bravo, Jean-Marc!

I asked one of the staff members to take some pictures for us, and you can see them below.

 

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Picture of the full session.

 

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Picture of Jean-Marc and I on stage.

 

After our session, we met with Jos Warmer, who is one of our VSX-insiders. He gave us some interesting feedback about DSL and it was good to finally put a face to a name. Below is a picture we took together.

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Picture of me, Jos and Jean-Marc.

In a few days, we will be in Munich, Germany. We will only be speaking to a very small group of developers and architects there, but it will be a great opportunity to meet the Microsoft Munich folks. I will send another update at that time.

 

- James

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 24, 2008
    Hi James, I enjoyed your talk at the Dutch DevDays event. VSX development is something no very straight forward, so thanks for showing us these nice demos. Also, great performance with Jean Marc.

  • Anonymous
    May 27, 2008
    As you might know, James and I are currently doing a VSX Tour in Europe. James already provided information

  • Anonymous
    May 28, 2008
    I was in the audience and your session was definitely one of the highlights for me. I did a writeup of my impressions: http://symbolsprose.blogspot.com/2008/05/devdays-2008-impressions.html

  • Anonymous
    May 28, 2008
    Patrick/Jeroen, Thank you very much for your positive feedback on our session. It's very to know that the work that we put in to prepare for the session is appreciated by you! Thank you for taking the time to let us know!

  • James

  • Anonymous
    June 12, 2008
    James Lau is blogging after each VSX tour event during the next several weeks. Follow the event reports,

  • Anonymous
    June 12, 2008
    This month's letter includes information about Microsoft's first VSX Developer Conference, updates to