DDD7 – My Session Picklist

So I am looking over the agenda for DDD7 and I am trying to work out which sessions I will attend.

Slot 1

I am in 2 minds about this one, I am in-between “Top 10 WCF tips” and “Seperating REST Facts from Fallacies”.

I really want to see the session on REST but we are bringing that session to Cambridge, unfortunately I don’t often get to see the full presentation at Cambridge because we have the business of running the user group.

I also love WCF and don’t think there are enough sessions on WCF, hence why I would quite like to go to this one also.

It’s a tough choice.

Slot 2

I think I am going to go to “ASP.NET MVC – Show me the code”.  ASP.NET MVC is one of those technologies I have wanted to play with for a while and that I haven’t seen any full sessions on.  I know this sounds odd as it’s been around for a bit now, but there is so much new stuff, some things just get pushed to the side.  I also haven’t heard Steven Sanderson speak before, so that will be cool also.

I would like to see Network Admin one (Dave McMahon is a brilliant speaker), however I just can’t commit to a double session, also I want to look at Developery things rather than IT Pro things.

Again the Virtualisation session is tempting however the MVC one happens to swing it.

Slot 3

This one is a no brainer to me “ASP.NET 4.0”, I didn’t go to any ASP.NET 4.0 sessions at PDC, and Dave and Phil are great speakers, so this will be a superb session.  Actually this is one of the reasons I avoided ASP.NET 4.0 at PDC, because I knew that this session was coming up :)

Slot 4

This is a tough one, I have seen enough of Oslo that I want to see for just now, so I am going to skip over that.

I am not really that interested in testing (also I am sure that we will have Ben across to Cambridge to do that session also), so I think I will skip that also.

I am interested in the Cores one but Daniel Moth covers that area so well, that I think I will go to the “Trust me, I know what you want” session.  There are a few reasons, this isn’t a typical developer session, it’s about requirements.  I also haven’t heard Beverly speak so it’s always great to hear speakers I haven’t heard before.  I also think that there isn’t enough Girly Geek Speakers so I think I will come along to this one.

Slot 5

Errgh, this is a No brainer for me, since I am presenting “Welcome to the Cloud”.  I think there may’be a few annoyed folks if I went to watch one of the other sessions.

Finally

All in all, it looks like a good day ahead.  It’s quite an interesting looking DDD.  There is quite a varied choice of sessions that are not just development sessions.

There are sessions that are about IT Pro (2 slots), Requirements (1 slot), and Virtualization (1 slot). 

• 3 out of 20 slots are IT Pro (Developer Admin Guide, Virtualization)
• 1 Slot is about requirements
• 1 Slot is on Linux (c# on ubuntu)
• 4 talks are about ASP.NET / Web (ASP.NET 4.0, MVC, CSS, Scaling)
• 2 sessions on concurrency
• 2 sessions of Services / Protocols (WCF, REST)
• 1 IoC container session
• 1 WPF Session
• 1 LINQ Session
• 1 Azure Session (Welcome to the Cloud)
• 1 Oslo Session

I think the following did surprise me though:

• No Silverlight Sessions
• No C# 4.0 sessions
• No VB Sessions
• No F# Sessions

One thing I think is clear, the UK community is pretty diverse (both attendees and speakers).  I say this because these sessions have been proposed and have been voted for. 

One thing for sure is that by attending sessions that are not necessarily straight technology sessions (like my one is), that you will gain an insight into different methodologies, technologies which will make you a better developer.

The other interesting thing to note about this DDD is that it seems to be about the now, not the future.  Only 4-5 sessions are about technologies that haven’t shipped (azure (cloud), 0.5 concurrency, 1 parallel, oslo, asp.net 4.0).  3/4 quarters of the sessions are about today.  Now I am not sure if this is because we had to propose sessions prior to the PDC, would this DDD agenda look different if it was in 3 months time?  Alternatively it could be because folks want to be focused on today, not tomorrow.

Anyways, DDD, I love it, and I am really looking forward to it, and I hope to see you there.