What sessions will I attend at devdays?
*Moved to: http://fluentbytes.com/what-sessions-will-i-attend-at-devdays/
I have been asked by Microsoft to share my schedule with all of you, so you know where I am interested in and perhaps meet up before or after the sessions.
To get the most out of a conference you can take two approaches:
you take the topics that are targeted at your day 2 day job and learn how you can improve in that area.
The other way is to learn stuff you don’t know yet. I myself most of the time take that route, to get me up to speed on stuff I don’t know yet and give me a brought perspective on the available technology. that will make me a whole better architect on the teams I work with. There are also other reasons for me to attend a specific session. e.g. the fact that I know the speaker personally and would like to see him speak again or sometimes support them giving a presentation.
So here goes my schedule for devdays:
Devdays, Preconference day
Well I will be at the ALM (Adopting agile practices) session, but hey you probably figured that already since I will be presenting the last part of the session on Agile Testing 
Day 1
I will of course be attending the key note sessions with Rob MIles, Wade Wagner, Scott Hanselman and Ben Riga. This is going to get us started the right way I think.
11:05-12:20
So for the next slot I already have a tough call, what will I do? Learn more about the Windows Phone with more information on probably the Mango update and how we can leverage all that as a developer? Or am I going to MVC 3, with Scott Hanselman. Watching him is always fun, he is such a great speaker. Even if he was presenting on a non tech topic I would probably would go and see this session. The last sessions I would like to attend is the session on JQuery. Why because it is something I have seen so little of yet and I always try to attend sessions that learn me the most in stead of topics I already am familiar with. e.g. What’s next on Azure should not give me any surprises since I am pretty involved with that team already.
13:30-14:45
Here I have to choose between an introduction to Light Switch, Reactive Extensions or Azure multi tenancy. The great thing at working at Info Support is that we already are deep into the cloud and have Presentations each Wednesday evening, where a consultant presents us a specific topic. Last year my Colleague Jonathan Mezach Already did a great session on reactive extensions and I have already seen some nice demo’s using it on the windows Phone. This probably means I will go and look at Light Switch because I think it can become a predominant way the business will approach us as developers the coming years, where they build a prototype themselves and want to hand it over to IT to make it work for the enterprise. I love to see where Light Switch is now at in Beta 2.
15:05-16:20
Well this slot I will be doing a presentations myself on the Visual Studio Ultimate test tools. I will show you how you can leverage Web testing, Load testing and the performance profiling tools together to build better quality code. Hope to see you there
16:30-17:45
there I will take the follow-up session on Light Switch, beyond the basics. That would give me a great head start in learning Light Switch and get back on speed on that product.
GeekNight
I will be doing a session with my colleagues Roy Cornelissen and Willem Meints on Phone development. Not just Phone development, no we are going to show you how you as a C# developer can be in a big advantage to all other app developers! You can build IPhone, IPad, Android and Windows Phone applications in C#. And we will show you how you can do it the right way. Leveraging Code Sharing between the application,but still light up the specific features of a particular Phone Brand. Don’t go for the least common denominator, but build apps that stand out by their natural fit for the specific platform while leveraging the power of C#, the .NET framework and sharing a common codebase.
Day 2
9:15-10:30
Tough call, My colleague Edwin van Wijk is doing a session on Monitoring and Managing your Azure applications. I think I will start the day by refueling some of my phone knowledge that is needed with the Mango update. I have not yet had the time to look at all the MIX content yet, so I hope to get a good update with the Windows Phone session.
10:50-12:05
Interesting stuff here also, Again a Light Switch follow up session, a session on the new Async keyword in C# v-next and a session on MVVM. The last one is interesting because I have seen so many MVVM approaches that all claim to be the silver bullet and I am curious if this session would give me some additional insights on the best way to leverage MVVM and if in WPF there are differences compared to Silverlight.
13:15-14:30
Man this is going to be complicated. We all know Ingo rammer and he has great debugging sessions, I attended a debugging session at teched presented by him and that gave me a tremendous productivity boost and insights how I could debug what is hard to debug. Brian Keller on testing, also a great presenter and a topic that is near my hart, Neno Loje one of my fellow ALM MVP’s who is very knowledgeable on TFS and VS. Also a session of two of my colleagues on Azure and heterogeneous applications in the cloud. Also a deep dive into the Azure ACS, which we use in our demo application I also appealing. Not sure yet which one it will be.
14:50-16:05
My fellow RD Alex Thissen is presenting on the new Razor view engine. Yep that will be the one.
16:15-17:30
Another session from my colleague Edwin van Wijk and Bert Ertman. I will attend this one, I want to see him on stage at least once and this will probably going to be the one.
Hope to see you at the conference and never hesitate to talk to me, I am there for you to listen and learn and if possible to provide you with advice.
cheers
Marcel
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