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EMEA ASP.NET 2.0 on Tour : post-mortem

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Last week Wednesday, we hosted the EMEA ASP.NET 2.0 on Tour event in Brussels, Belgium.

This was our first official public appearance with ASP.NET 2.0 on the Belgian developer market.
(Ok, we already did some usergroup & partner presentations about it, but this was truely the first MS-introduction of ASP.NET 2.0)

Boy, what an event this was and that's a 2-fold statement !!!

1) Never have I seen such a hectic & stressed event like this.

  • Weather conditions preventing our EMEA speakers to arrive on time. Not even being sure that our speakers would arrive at all until 10:30AM in the morning.
  • Finding a last minute keynote speaker… and finding one that we couldn’t have dreamt of in the first place… the Redmond Group Product Manager Dev Tools (Prashant Sridharan) and excellent keynote speaker!
  • Prashant leaving Amsterdam at 1:00AM (yes, that’s right after midnight) by Taxi and arriving in Brussels at 5:00AM… no sleep.
  • Finding the logistics to broadcast Prashant’s keynote in 2 cinema rooms at 3:00AM in the morning (audio, video, camera,…)
  • Prashant delivering a truly amazing keynote and sharing some of his exclusive insights into Visual Studio 2005 Team System.
  • Eventually, starting our initial agenda at 1:00PM in the afternoon, rescheduling the agenda and jamming all sessions through until 18:00PM with excellent speakers like Dave Webster, David Platt and our MVP Bart De Smet.

2) However, all this being professionally managed by Tom Mertens (our local Developer Community Manager), the team, the speakers and the A/V crew, resulting in a transparent & enjoyable event experience for an audience of approx 1000 developers. Attendees I spoke with experienced Prashant’s extra keynote as an additional & exclusive benefit, whilst still receiving the originally scheduled content & sessions in the afternoon. Although some attendees needed to leave early, they were the ones that missed the actual ASP.NET 2.0 stuff... Some people complained about the lack of breakfast meals in the morning, that's something we heard loud & clear.

Due to last-minute agenda-rescheduling, we had to deliver our session "Personalization & Membership session in ASP.NET 2.0" twice in order to give attendees the opportunity to follow both the ASP.NET 2.0 First Look sessions (Part 1 & 2). Our session built on some basic ASP.NET 2.0 knowledge, so we were forced to deliver this after the other 2 fundamentals sessions. Overall feedback has been very positive on new enhancements of ASP.NET 2.0, especially the productivity enhancements & code reductions. Some devs came to me and asked if they still had a job after ASP.NET 2.0 - which I thought was funny. The answer I'd say is, absolutely yes! The good thing about the Framework enhancements is that it allows devs to focus on the business logic of an application, the app itself, the business problems that you're trying to solve... instead of low-level plumbing. Whenever I talk to CIO's & IT Managers, this is the thing that constantly comes up as their nr 1 concern : "reduce the overall TCO of our development processes & efforts and deliver a faster time-to-market. Can you do that?". Oh yeah, we can! :-)

If you attended the event, please fill out you're evaluations - we truely value these to make these type of events better.

Regards,
Guntherb.

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