Impressions of the Software Developer Conference
Yesterday and today I was invited to the "Software Developer Conference" in Arnhem, The Netherlands. This year was the fifteenth time Remi Caron & the "Software Developer Network" organized this conference.
Looking at the session overview and the speakers, I can only say: "I'm impressed". This conference is not like any other Microsoft multi-day conference. Despite most attendees find it hard choosing the right session from the 10 parallel tracks, it is a small conference. Small rooms that facilitate interaction between speaker and the audience, paper-based speaker evals, no more than 40 attendees per session, etc.
On Monday evening Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell recorded their "Mondays - What Sunday threw up" show live at the conference. It'll be on-line next Monday.
One last thing I found interesting at this conference was that the attendees are not all developers on the Microsoft platform. A lot of them are Delphi (Win32) developers. Even David Intersimone, Borland's Chief Evangelist was there and talked about both Win32 programming and developping on the .NET platform.
Some of the attendees told me they never attend a Microsoft event (DevDays). They prefer to attend this conf because of the feeling this is a conference for the developer and by the developer, not by Microsoft. And ... with only 2 blue badged speakers and 2 other attendees Microsoft was not omnipresent at this conference.
Keep up the good work guys. Just like all the speakers I talked too, I very much enjoyed being at SDC!