Less than 10 days ago the First European NHibernate Day took place in Bologna: here are some comments on the day and in a future post, being among the organizers, the process that lead to event.

The Attendance

Let’s start from the event day: even if the biggest part of the attendance was Italian, it was amazing to see so many people coming from various countries, and travelling even from Sweden and Norway to attend this event. This made the European NHDay a really international event.

The sessions

Unfortunately I was not able to attend all the speeches, but the few I attended were great: Ayende is a great speaker, not only from the technical point of view, but also because of the interaction he creates with the people attending his speeches. But do not forget also the other guys, the ones that held the presentations in the “small room” and treated more theoretical topics.

And icing on the cake was the Q&A that we did with Fabio Maulo over Skype: lot of great questions and lot of conversations about ConfORM and NH3.

It might sound crazy and ironic, but I the thing that surprised me the most was the session about RavenDB. I had tested it in June/July but it since then it got a lot better. And I was also pretty happy that they added a feature I suggested when I was testing it. I should really find a way to use it somehow in a project.

The #NHDay tag

It was a great success on twitter: the #NHDay tag has been one of the top 5 trending topic twice during the day in Switzerland (we had at least 4 people from Switzerland attending and tweeting) and when Fabio Maulo announced that NHibernate 3 went beta during the NHDay, it was also a trending topic in Italy, even more “trending” that #wired.

What if you couldn’t attend?

For the first time we streamed the event live on ustream.tv, and the live received 70 unique viewers, which is pretty amazing. The great thing aboout ustream is that the live videos are available also for on-demand viewing: so if you missed the event and the live show, you can watch the sessions of the main room (the one with Ayende) online: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nhday-main-room

We also recorded all the sessions, both screencast of the presenter’s laptop and of the speaker, and when the Gods of the digital divide allow us, we will publish them online too. Hopefully the quality will be a bit better than the dump of the live video.

Last but not least, all the presentations are available for download (or for online viewing since most are on slideshare) linked from the agenda on the NHDay site.

Last thoughts

Overall it was a great event, many interesting talks: too bad I was coming from super-busy period with both the final bits of the organization of the event and all the issues with my removal and change of country, and I was not able to enjoy the event as I would have loved to. But thank you again to all the people that helped make the NHDay a great event.

And also a great thank to the sponsors that made the NHDay possibile and that made it possibile to have a prize for almost every attendee. And remember that you have some discounts for buying the NHibernate 3 cookbook and a copy of Visual NHibernate using the codes I announced during the keynote.

Stay tuned for the announcement of the videos.