TechDays 2013

Yesterday in the Palais des Congrès of Paris started the Microsoft TechDays 2013. Microsoft is well known to conduct useful events for the IT community and the TechDays 2013 is not an exception. 

I was subscribed for the first day of the event, actually the most interesting for developers. My agenda contained basically the .NET related sessions and one BigData session.

The day started with a keynote "Développeurs, c'est vous le chef !!" guided by Jean Ferré, Director of DPE.

It was presented in the very French way of a cooking session, where for each case you have an aperitif and than you are preparing entrée, plat and dessert. And each of that dishes is an app made tout de suite by the speakers.

There were clear points in this keynote related to the strategy of today's Microsoft. It's not the company which blindly focuses on their own solutions anymore. Microsoft decided to go the way to diversify the use of the technology and finally accept the existence of all other platforms and eco-systems. Also Microsoft gives a lot of attention to support the mutliscreen environment, produce cutting-edge design and to mine the BigData in the cloud.

The first session I participated was about the core .NET Framework 4.5 features including optimized GC, enhanced JITter and debugging capabilities as well as new concurrency-related features. The video is available here and the presentation is here.

After the lunch I chose the BigData session. The focus was mainly on the Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) technology. By-the-way PDW could be a good "relational choice" for those who are considering NoSQL solutions in terms of scalability and performance. The video is available here. 

Next session had a self-explanatory title "C# et .NET : Enigmes et puzzles". The auditorium was full, I was very lucky to get the place there, thank to my colleague who found another entrance :). That was the geeky stuff, a deep dive into the C# specs with riddles in the manner of old good Mr Bjarne Stroustrup :). Just to give you some quick insight what it was about, try to figure out the output of the next line:

int i = 0;
Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} {2} {3}", ++i, i++ * ++i, i, i++ + i++);

You can find the presentation here.

Another session was about the what's new in the Visual Studio 2012. Actually I was happy to discover that they did a lot in terms of enhancing the productivity. Thus finally we have a really powerful Windows 7 like search, missing Eclipse IDE features like instant type search and hierarchy tree, build-in reference search in the solution explorer. I'm looking forward to finally try to use Visual Studio 2012. The video is available here and here is the presentation.

But the most incredible session was the last one. It was a sweet dessert after a good meal. The title stated it explicitly that it's going to be "Coding for fun" :). The speakers were on the top, lots of fun, lots of jokes and of course lots of stupid but funny apps starting with pure CSS/HTML5 pages doing incredible Star Wars like intro without no line of the JavaScript and finishing by the "L-system"-based algorithm application, Windows Phone 8 applications and even Kinect Arkanoid using sound of the audience as a joystick :). If you want to see the presentation is it located here.

To summarize, lots of information, crowd of IT people and lots of fun during this day at the TechDays 2013 Paris. The TechDays TV replay of the 12th of February can be found here.

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