IMTC 2008: Day Two Review
On Friday, April 4th, I attended Day Two of the 3rd annual Irish Microsoft Technology Conference. It was another jam-packed day with lots of well-known speakers who are experts in their fields.
Ben Sykes kicked off the first session on Friday with a discussion called "What Species is YOUR User?" about the fundamentals of interactivity and memory, and how these principles can and should affect your web creations. I really enjoy hearing about the psychology side of the web as I know very little about it. Ben gave some great practical examples as well to demonstrate his points.
Another really different and entertaining talk I saw was an overview of Mix 08 by Phil Winstanley. Phil did a nice job timing his slides and presentation so the flow was great. He pointed out the highlights of the sessions and keynotes (and bars/clubs/Stratosphere), along with the important new technology announcements from Mix, and succeeded in making me very jealous of those who went. Most critical, there was a strong presence of lolcats, and I am a sucker for lolcats, so I give Phil's talk two thumbs up.
After lunch I listened to Gary Short talk about using the Web Client Software Factory. Even if you had no interest in WCSF, you would sit and listen to Gary because he is a wonderful speaker with such a fantastic accent. But as it happens, WCSF is actually really cool and useful, which is even better. I confess I knew nothing about WCSF before I saw Gary's session but was very impressed with the modularity enabled by it as well as all the baked-in capabilities. It seems very cool and I'm glad Gary showed it off - I will definitely be taking a deeper look into WCSF in the near future.
The last session I saw on Friday was Doug Seven's talk on how to Reach End Users with Next Generation Web Applications. Doug is a Senior Product Manager for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, and he is amazing because this was his *fourth* talk of the conference. He flew over from Redmond, Washington especially for the IMTC. He did a great job showing off support for developers and IT pros with VS 2008 and even handled a database corruption incredibly well. I'm looking forward to watching the videos of some of his other talks, including Breakthrough Development Challenges with WS & Improving Team Development with Microsoft VSTS.
I didn't get to see anything else on Friday because my session was the last one of the day. I couldn't believe that over 70 people stayed until the last session on the last day! Very impressed with the IMTC crowd! I went over some of the new features of Silverlight 2 including Deep Zoom, demonstrated examples of managed code and script communicating, and also showed off the new beta versions of Expression Encoder and Expression Blend and some of their new features. Like Doug, I also ran into a couple of demo woes right at the beginning, but thankfully I had a great audience who helped me out and got me past being flustered, especially after having gone through them 9327548917414 times before the session started. Thanks everyone!
I hope all the attendees and speakers enjoyed their time at the IMTC. This is the first time the event has ever been two full days, and it was incredibly successful, so we'll likely do two days again next year.
If you are looking for more tech talks, or you missed some of the speakers, you have some options. I mentioned in my last IMTC post about DDD Ireland, which is taking place the first weekend of May in Galway at GMIT. It's a full day of Microsoft MVP speakers talking about the technology they love, and several of the speakers from the IMTC will be there, including Dave McMahon, Oliver Sturm, Phil Winstanley, Gary Short, and Richard Costall. Oh yeah, and it's *free*. Register now, as registrations are filling up and spaces are limited. The DVDs of the IMTC will also be available in about a month, so if you registered for the IMTC, you should be receiving them about a month from now.
If you have any feedback about the event, questions, concerns or suggestions for next year, please feel free to either leave a comment below or e-mail me at martharo [at] microsoft.com. Thanks for your participation!
Technorati Tags: Irish Microsoft Technology Conference,IMTC,Microsoft Ireland
Cross posted from Martha's Blog