At the end of April, Microsoft Belgium organized the TechDays Belgium, the annual developer and IT conference in Belgium, to which I had the pleasure to attend. I also manned the Ask The Expert booth and helped attendees with their questions about ASP.NET MVC, Orchard and web development.
It was 3 days of very interesting sessions, ranging from the keynote/standup comedy show by Scott Hanselman to the ASP.NET MVC Deep Dive sessions by Hadi Hariri and to the Girls-Power WP7 development session by Katrien DeGraeve and Isabel Gomez Miragaya. And the last day was a deep-dive on everything ALM: a bit of the usual TFS marketing but also a very good session about how to implement Kanban with TFS.
If you didn't attend the conference, or if you attended but missed, like I did, some sessions because they were at the same time of other you attended, you can watch them online both on the official TechDays Belgium 2011 site, where you can find both dev and IT pro videos, or on Channel 9, where you can directly go to the videos and download also other formats and the slides.
Here are my personal favorites:
- ASP.NET MVC 3 - Deep Dive and Getting the most out of ASP.NET MVC 3, both by Hadi Hariri: two must see sessions that show you how to use ASP.NET MVC to its full extent, taking advantage of the extensibility points and changing the behaviors you don't like
- The keynote by Scott Hanselman: shows how we arrived where we are now, and how all the Lego pieces fit together
- Implementing Lean Software Delivery with Kanban and Team Foundation Server 2010: very nice explanation of what Kamban is, and how to quickly implement a Kanban WorkItem type and a online kanban board with TFS. The code is also available to download from codeplex.
- WCF Web APIs, HTTP your way by Glenn Block: a "project" under the WCF umbrella that aims at building REST APIs using WCF