Yesterday I attended DDD!D 3 along with other Conchango-ites Richard Griffin, Andy Britcliffe, Mark Mann, Tony Scott and Christian Wade – who incidentally gave a talk titled “SQL Server 2005 Development: Tips n’ Tricks”. This is the first time I had attended DDD!D - there was a great buzz and it was really impressive to see so many people give up a Saturday to attend. Microsoft did a great job hosting the event. Many thanks to all who made it happen. I found some of the content a bit mixed - out of the five sessions I attended, one was poor, two were mediocre and two were excellent.
"Monad – why developers should care" presented by Thomas Lee – the main problem with this session was that The Presenter took an incredibly exciting technology and made it look quite dull; the Monad session at PDC was the second highest rated session overall (I had several "oh my god moments watching it), but this session had none of that buzz. If only Thomas Lee demonstrated something like Monad ‘s XML handling capabilities - that would have blown the socks off most of the attendees – for example how easy it is to parse an RSS feed and print out a list of this blogs posts, by title and publication date:
([xml](new-object Net.WebClient).DownloadString("http://blogs.conchango.com/howardvanrooijen/rss.aspx")).rss.channel.item | select title, pubdate
"Hands on introduction to Windows Presentation Foundation" presented by Tim Scarfe - this is a session that I considered the weakest of the ones I attended, not because there were technical difficulties, meaning that the demonstration laptop was running and crawl (not exactly what you need when demonstrating a state of the art graphics system) but the fact that the content of the presentation was totally uninspiring. When you’re trying to enthuse the audience about a cutting edge technology which treats images, audio, video as ubiquitous media, then drawing a couple of squares and a button on a form and then animating the button on a the motion path is not the most exciting demonstrations. Even the video shown to demonstrate Windows Presentation Foundation’s capabilities was that the North Face demo which debuted almost a year ago - this now looks incredibly dated and basic compared to the BBC demo presented at mix06. It would have been nice to see the demo of code to do something almost impossible using current technologies such as 3D manipulation of video content, and showing it done in just a few lines of xaml - a really impressive example can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/llobo/archive/2006/05/30/611026.aspx
"Indigo, SOA and the real world" presented by Daniel Fisher and Michael Willers. This was by far the best presentation of the day, I really liked the breadth and depth of the topic and the way it was delivered, the example code they demonstrated was top notch, the walkthrough of their documentation included threat modelling diagrams, was rather fascinating. It was really good to see a talk that was aimed at a much higher level and delivered real content rather than just kicking the tires of a piece of pre-beta software. You can tell the guys from newtelligence really know their craft.
"Atlas and Live.com" presented by Thomas Brattli. This was the second best presentation of the day, I thought Thomas pitched at the right level and covered the right content, even though I’ve been looking at Atlas over the past couple of weeks it was great to get another overview, it was the frist time I had seen a demonstration of how to create and install a Live.com gadget. The highlight for me was Thomas using the Atlas Script Debug window - which I had never seen before!
"Health Monitoring your ASP.Net to 2.0 Applications" presented by Dave Sussman. Even though this topic is quite dull Dave is a great presenter and delivered the content well - this is one area of ASP.NET 2.0 that I have very little knowledge of and an area which has scant documentation, I certainly took some learning’s away that I shall try and implement in my current project.
Apart from Indigo, SOA and the real world" the highlight of the day was an impromptu talk by Ed Gibson, the Microsoft UK security adviser. This man has some serious gravitas, the entire crowd was in awed silence during his talk. You can find a good article about the man here.
All in all it was quite enjoyable day, but wasn’t quite what I was expecting. Maybe I read too many blogs and very little of the content was unknown to me, maybe it was because the last big geeky conference I went to was PDC or maybe I’m being a little too critical because it was the day after one of the best Conchango Community Days I’ve ever been to. I’m not sure – I hope the content of the next DDD!D is a lot more varied.
Why was the Conchango Community Day so good? In our User Experience session we discussed how user stories could be used as a mechanism for better collaboration between developers, designers, user experience and testers. In the .Net session I talked about future technologies and Ian Shimmings gave a great in-depth demo of LINQ. In the afternoon Neil Kidd from Microsoft gave a Chalk ‘n’ Talk about .NET 2.0 and then we had a great Agile Community Session where Ian Shimmings gave a fantastic talk called "Making Agile Succeed". Hopefully I’ll talk about this in more detail in another post later this week.
Friday was also a good day because we had our 1000th download of Scrum for Team System.
[Update] There are a couple of flickr sets of the event:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/plip/sets/72157594154434387 and http://flickr.com/photos/chrisgcom/sets/72157594155169101