TechDays 2011 Review

On the 6th of September I travelled to Oslo to attend the first day of TechDays 2011, the new brand for the TechNet and MSDN Live events. It was held in the Clarion Hotel in Gardemoen which made it very handy to get in an out the same day. There was a mixture of tracks covering subjects like Web, BI, Cloud, and Client.

It was a really interesting day and I got to the following sessions

• Intro to JavaScript/jQuery with Gøran Hansen
• Advanced analytics with Excel and SQL Server 2008 R2 Data Mining with Rafal Lukawiecki
• Collaborative Business Intelligence with Rafal Lukawiecki
• DDD and the presentation layer with Gøran Hansen

Arif Shafique a developer evangelist with Microsoft stepped in and did a session on HTML5 and Windows Phone 7 due to a last minute schedule change.

Gøran’s first session was an intro session which for me was a bit low, but I like hearing what Gøran has to say and he does talk a lot of sense, which is also why I went to his DDD session. I also bumped into Alex York who did a session the following day as well as Fredrik Kalseth who was also speaking that day on making the enterprise ready for HTML5 apps.

I enjoyed Rafal’s sessions quite a lot as Rafal is very well prepared, speaks with an enormous amount of enthusiasm for his subject and also presents in a very clear and understandable way. If you want to learn more about data mining and SQL Server, Rafal has launched his new Project Botticelli website where he will have videos and training available.

I attended as part of NNUG and later in the day I was interviewed by Petri Wilhelmsen about the role of community in a developer’s learning and also about the Norwegian .NET User Group.

Thanks to Petri and Anders Borchsenius for the invite up and for combing MSDN and TechNet Live into a good event. Hopefully this will be one again next year