Introduction

My techdays 2011 (Belgian edition) started on Monday evening with a small dinner with Scott Hanselman, Glenn Block, Hadi Hariri, Maarten Balliauw, Yves Goeleven and Katrien De Graeve. It was great to meet this people, most for the first time. And Scott looked even worse than usual, respect man, travelling across the world to speak to people you do not know when you are in pain and just lost your voice, respect. Of course it did not stop him from talking, and you can get a feel of how difficult it is to get in a word with these guys if you listen to the latest Hanselminutes.

Keynote

The next day was a long day of presentations, starting with the keynote in which someone mentioned my name. So go look at the keynote. And the bribe was just a joke but it worked. VB.Net will take over the world, resistance is futile, and the first steps have been made.

Sessions

I won’t speak about all the sessions I went to, just the ones that left an impression.

I went to 3 sessions by Glenn Block. The man is passionate about what he speaks and if you follow him on twitter you will know that means he will take over your timeline from time to time. The first talk was about the new WCF web API. It shows a lot of promise and seemed easy enough to use. In his second talk he learned us about REST which I now understand better. And the third talk was about MEF which I will try to use some more but I’m not promising anything.

The last talk of the day was by Hadi Hariri and a deep dive into MVC3. If you use MVC3 you definitely should check this out.

Of course I liked the keynote by Scott Hanselman but his deep dive into Nuget (with failed demo) was interesting, since once the proxy problems are solved (in version 1.4) I will even be able to use it at work. So I’m very much awaiting the next version of Nuget.

I also went to the session by Katrien about a WP7 application from start to finish. I am on the lookout to give my users the ability to be more mobile but for now WIFI is not an option at our company, but I am working on it. So perhaps next year I will use what I learned about WP7 this year.

VB.Net

As a VB.Net developer I once again did not see any VB.Net code which is a bit sad but I get used to it. And I speak C# so that is not really the problem. Not sure how many VB programmers there are at these kinds of events so I do not know if it is worth the trouble.

Socializing

On Wednesday I also met someone I met on twitter, @Axel8s which was pretty cool. It’s always so cool that you get to stick a face to a handle.

At the nerd dinner that evening I saw a few more twitter people like @simonech, @robashton, @yreynhout and @dewildemaarten and many more.

So, on the social side it was a very good techdays11 for me. On the content side it was a bit less than last year.