Danish Developer Conference 2014

Once again Microsoft has arranged the yearly Danish Developer Conference (DDC). Previous years the venue has been Horsens, but this year they moved the conference to Aarhus. The past two years  they have also had a venue in Copenhagen, to attract the capitals developer force, but this year they seem to focus on the mainland developers(!). One of things that strike me about this conference is that it is a purely Danish conference, even the website is Danish only. I really don’t get this, it seems like Microsoft feels obligated to arrange this local conference, but does not do much more than absolutely necessary. I get the point of focusing on and promoting the Danish developer scene, but to me it seems limiting that this conference lacks international inspiration. On another note, it seems weird to me that there is not an official call for papers (CFP). All speakers are hand-picked by the Microsoft conference committee. I get the commercial stuff, but why not let the masses propose sessions? There are tons of hobby projects in the Danish community, promoting and facilitating Microsoft tools, that would provide DDC with some dedicated flavor. And that really deserves some public attention.

Again this year, I’ll attend the conference, and again my employer is sponsoring the event. This post will focus on my expectations.

At this years Build conference, Microsoft as a company revealed a number of new initiatives. In his keynote, Preben Meijer will enlighten us with details of Microsoft's new strategy. The first session to attend is a tough call, either hear Mads Kristensen on modern web development with Visual Studio or hear Thomas Jespersen’s talk on Spiir’s Azure experiences. At the time of writing I tend to attend Thomas’ talk, since Mads’ is available on Channel 9.

Lately it was announced that my preferred SPA framework, DurandalJS, is going to be merged with AngalurJS. So to me it seems that AngularJS is the de-facto standard for SPA frameworks, I’ll therefore attend my former colleague Christian Holm Nielsen’s talk on AngularJS and ASP.NET. After the lunch break I’ll attend Henrik Westergaard Hansen’s talk on new features in Azure. The Azure team has a very rapid development cycle, so there is always some new features to catch up with. Should be a great session. The following session slot is again a tough call, either the SignalR session or the cross-platform talk with Xamarin and Visual Studio. This is two great technologies, and I would prefer to attend them both. Currently, I tend to attend the Xamarin talk, since I really need a kick to get started with Xamarin. I have the intentions and did some spiking, but this session might get me in the right direction. I have done some SignalR development before, so I do not need an introduction, but it would be great to get some tips and tricks. I'll stick to the Xamarin session for now.

The last session slot of this one-day conference is, in my opinion, the one with the least attractive sessions. I'll either attend the Entity Framework session or Mads Kristensen's session on developing Visual Studio extensions. I have no experience in extensibility, and so-far no intentions of writing any extensions to Visual Studio, but Mads might inspire me. I have previously been using Entity Framework, so it might be great to get brush-up on the latest. I guess I'll make a decision on the day.

This is my DDC 14 schedule as of writing. My experience is that I might change my mind on the day.

If you plan to attend DDC 14, don’t hesitate to say hi, much of attending a conference is to network.