IMTC 2008: Day One Review

I am still trying to recover from the 3rd annual Irish Microsoft Technology Conference.  Literally, because I completely lost my voice sometime Friday evening (luckily after my talk) and still don't have it back.  My phone also disappeared during the conference.  Hmm, no phone and no voice...I get the feeling someone is trying to tell me something... ;-)

The conference was a blast.  We brought over speakers from the UK and the US, along with a US film crew for live streaming the events (thanks to Chuck Boyce).  The four tracks covered a wide variety of Microsoft technology including IT Pro and Developer focused sessions.  I had the opportunity to catch quite a few sessions, too, and I learned a lot of new things.

One of the best sessions I've se en in a long time was Richard Costall's talk on Silverlight.  Richard gave the first talk of the day on Thursday to a pretty packed theatre.  His talk was completely interactive...with himself.  Rich created a Silverlight app that had a video viewer built-in and used media markers to cue himself to interact, ask questions, point out tips and even pimp his own book!  It was really entertaining and well-done.  Thanks Richard!!

For interactiveness, Chris Dalby's talk on eStorming and Live Meeting was very cool.  Chris not only set up the session as a Live Meeting itself, he also had someone from Microsoft Ireland in Sandyford log in to the Live Meeting session and demo Roundtable for us, which was very cool!  Ireland is really lucky in that Roundtable is not available in many places yet, but it is available here as of February.  Nice talk on Live Meeting - I did not know much about before and I really learned a lot.

I listened to Chris Seary talk about "Securing Communications using WCF."  He discussed WS-Security and WCF and how and when to use them.  Chris gave several very nice demos, too, including examining the WCF Service Library and various methods of protecting communications.  There was a lot of great technical detail in Chris' talk and it was quite well done.

Randy Henne has just moved to Ireland.  His talk, "Experiment for Optimising Customer Experience", explained a lot about experiments performed on websites, such as amazon.com, to find out how customers react to small changes and how different UI affects their behavior and thinking.  I found it to be fascinating.  Randy moved here to set up the Experimentation Platform Team at Microsoft's European Development Centre, so I look forward to seeing more about him and his group's work.

Oliver Sturm talked about LINQ and changing the way you code.  Oliver is a very relaxed and easy-going speaker who is incredibly knowledgeable in all areas of .Net.  His code and demonstrations were very straightforward and easy to follow.  I didn't get to see his other talk on Functional Programming in C#3, so I'm looking forward to getting the video of that.  Or I can wait and see it in a month at DDD Ireland.  Oliver is also talking about WPF and the end of Windows Forms at DDD Ireland.

Cross posted from Martha's Blog