Conference

Build 2018

Sunday, May 13, 2018

Another year and another Build conference. Last year I said I’d go this year given the opportunity, and I was given the opportunity. The original build conference was billed as //build/ Windows. You could bring whatever tools you knew to build great Windows apps. This conference has morphed over the years and is now //build/ Azure. This is disappointing to me. Like last year the first day keynotes were centered around the server and Azure.…

Build 2017

Monday, May 15, 2017

Microsoft Build is the ultimate conference for me. It’s a developer conference that focuses on Microsoft’s roadmap for the coming year. Every year after the keynote and first day of sessions I rush to a computer to try out what I’ve learned. It’s such a rush to, as everyone says, drink from the firehose. This year, however, was different. The first day was about server technologies. Normally they save that for the second day.…

Build 2015

Sunday, May 3, 2015

This year marks the 4th year that I have gone to the Microsoft //build/ conference. I had to miss last year due to some mix-up at work, but that’s in the past. Every year seems to try and outdo the previous year and this was no different. This year some announcements were made that blew many people away. I was not one of them. I did find many of the sessions were very useful and made the whole conference great.…

Build 2014 an outsider's summary

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

I was unable to go to BUILD this year, and that made me pretty sad. This year’s theme was “Cloud First; Mobile First.” - but wait, how can both be first? Well, that’s the question they wanted you to ask. So instead let’s ask, “What about desktop?” You see //build (yes I’m going to type it every way I can) was about 2 things this year: Azure (now called Microsoft Azure) and Windows Phone 8.…

Chirp the Twitter Conference - a Retrospective

Saturday, April 17, 2010

The Twitter Chirp conference just ended. If any of you have been following it online you may have heard the news that they’ve detailed @Anywhere, provided a glimpse of their business model, and announced personal streams that will be available soon. I’m writing this to talk about some of the behind the scenes stuff that you couldn’t get from Justin.TV. Although this was a developer conference, it seemed there was really only two types of people I met there: business development people trying to sell me something, or little kids that are looking for jobs.…

Mix07 Day 1-Session 2

Saturday, May 5, 2007

For the second session I decided to go to a talk titled, “Developing Data Driven Applications Using the New Dynamic Data Controls in ASP.NET.” I should have known better than to go to this. Every time someone from Microsoft demonstrates the “power” of a grid control, detail control, or similar control they use the most trivial example and make the rest of us look like morons because our apps seem to require hundreds of lines of code to produce results.…

Mix07 Day 1-Session 1

Thursday, May 3, 2007

Building rich web experiences with Silverlight. This session was presented by Joe Stegman. Joe is an excellent presenter and I’ve attended many of his web casts including the Digital Black Belt series that helped prepare people for security issues with web site design. Joe was presenting Silverlight to us using the go-live loving beta of version 1.0. He made it clear that he would show us some of the stuff the Scott demonstrated in his keynote, only using the now-defunct-yet-not-released-yet version 1.…

Mix07 Day 1-The Keynotes

Thursday, May 3, 2007

Today was the first full day at Mix 07. It started this morning at 9:30 with a keynote address from Ray Ozzie who said this about following in Bill Gate’s shadow, “There will never be another Bill Gates.” Ray also gave the high level vision of what Silverlight really is. It isn’t a Flash competitor, even though it will compete in that space. It’s really the third wheel assisting apps that cannot decide if they are desktop applications or web applications.…

Mix07 Day 1-Session 3

Thursday, May 3, 2007

Okay, for the Keynote and the first two sessions I learned stuff that I cannot use in my day-to-day programming because (and take your pick here): It’s not released yet The version that will do what I need it to do is the next version after the one we are currently developing I can’t get away from .NET 1.1, what makes me think I can do something in 2.0 or 3.…

Mix07 a 72 Hour Conversation

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

I’m in Las Vegas this week for the Mix07 conference. It is being billed as a 72 hour conversation but I’m learning that they want to sleep. It’s now 2:50 AM and there’s nobody left to converse with. I wonder if I should feel cheated… What’s in store for the week? Well it looks like it’s going to be three days of learning about Silverlight. Silverlight is Microsoft’s answer to Flash.…