Impressions from the "Get ready for VS 2005" conference in Israel
MS Israel help 2 free single day conferences today and the day before. Yesterday was all about "Get ready for SQL 2005" and today was mainly for developers and dealt with many topics related to developers with VS.NET 2003 moving to 2005 (See
Hebrew topic list).
Unfortunately, I wasn't actually there, but speaking with some friends who were there here are the latest impressions from the conference. If you want to share your own thoughts on what was OK and what needs improvement, feel free to write a comment to this post.
- Keynote on Visual Studio Team System
- Very professional presentation, good teamwork
- However, VSTS is already chewed beyond recognition - too much hype?
- Developing Office Solutions with Visual Studio 2005 - The Smart Client Way
- Some great feedback on this, easily one of the best talks. Started out rather nicely with a story about a trip to Namibia, no less!
- ASP.NET: Best Practices and Techniques for Migrating ASP.NET 1.x Applications to ASP.NET 2.0
- Very good technical content - good talk
- Overview of ASP.NET 2.0 - The Secured Way
- A bit hard to follow. Subject matter is not easy, that's for sure...
Food:
The SQL conference's food was way better than the one at the VS 2005 conf.
Amount of people:
Huge amount of people in both.
One of the things to note is that in the month or two before these conferences, Microsoft's evangelists took care in making as much of the speakers as possible do their talk in front of the .NET user groups (more than 10 of these!) here in Israel - so some of the talks have already been heard by some of the people. You could say that this just gives the user group goers a reason to be happy - they get the information before everyone else, but you could also look at it from a different angle - where user groups are the guinea pigs of conference talks. I'm not sure I like that so much, but I'm not 100% set on my mind there. would love to know your thoughts on this too.