1 day conference – Primary Danish - $200 - www.danishdevconf.com

The first of the conferences I attended this year was on the last day of April. It was in Aarhus, and it was one of the conferences I’ve attended since it started three years ago. The Conference is a Microsoft conference; this means that there is a lot of focus on Microsoft technologies. For me as a web developer, the main attraction at the conference is Mads Kristensen from the Visual Studio tooling team. He has been presenting at the conference every year, and this year he had two sessions.

Besides Mads and his talks I didn’t really have any “must see” sessions, being a web developer, I went to a AngularJs session, and as my company likes to integrate Office products, I went to an Office 365 API session. Lastly, it was a look at new stuff in Microsoft Azure, and its management portal.

Venue

I’ve always been impressed about the venue at DDC. The reason is that they have made arrangement with Cinemaxx, a large cinema-group. This means that the sessions are held in cinemas, which provides awesome seating’s, and even more awesome screens and sound.

Content

Keynote was held by a Danish “thinker”, Preben Mejer, who talked about the new Microsoft, CEO version 3.0, and in general where he saw Microsoft moving and positioning them self in the future. This was an interesting keynote, and overall, Preben liked what he saw coming out of Redmond these days, and he was very fond of Satya Nadella, the engineer, taking from Steve Ballmer, the businessman.

Of the sessions I attended, the ones with Mads Kristensen was the ones I got the most out of. He showed the newest and shiniest tooling for Visual Studio, and gave a great talk on what the future will bring for Visual Studio. This is very inspiring for developers like me. He talked mentioned their integrations to other frameworks like Angular and Bootstrap and intellicence for them. Also showed early prototypes of integrating grunt and gulp and PowerShell directly in Visual Studio. The second talk I attended with Mads was on extensions for Visual Studio. Mads is one of the people that has made the most extensions for VS, and has the most downloaded. He’s behind Web Essentials, and showed off a few sample extensions like Farticus and Voice Commands. The sample extensions were open source, and meant to show others how to make extensions to Visual Studio.

Unfortunately, the rest of the sessions disappointed me. I don’t know whether I misread what the sessions was about, or that I just already knew most of the stuff in them.

The sessions were AngularJs, which took AngularJs from the bottom, and showed how to use it in the Microsoft Web Stack. Although this was relevant, had you looked at AngularJs prior to the session, it wouldn’t really give you much.

Another session was a look at the Office 365 API, which ended up telling us that the API wasn’t finished, but it will come around soon. The final session I attended was a look at what’s new in Microsoft Azure. This gave a little insight in the new features, such as WebJobs and Mobile services changes. It was an ok Session, and nice to see some examples of these new features.

Roundup on DDC 2014

The prior years I’ve been attending DDC, I was fully exited afterwards, primarily because I took something with me, that I could go home and implement in my job as a web developer. This year, I didn’t get much back. Mads’ sessions was super inspiring, but it was on the tooling and not so much on things I can go implement in current customers solutions.

Where this conference had been a “no-brainer” to attend earlier, I thing I need to read the program thoroughly next year, in order to decide whether to go or not.