DevReach 2007, Sofia, Bulgaria (Day 1)

I missed the first DevReach in 2006, but this year I made it to the conference. All of the speakers on Day 1 were really good and they captivated me till the end of each of the sessions. Here is a quick recap of the talks, that I visited.

Side note: I don't know if it was just for the presentation, but none of the speakers that showed code in VS.NET had ReSharper installed. Just weird! :)

Developers are from Mars, Managers are from Venus
by Chad Hower, Level 200

I decided to start with a light and entertaining talk. I definitely got what I came for. Great slides, very humorous presentation... At one point in the presentation Chad asked his audience how many of us work for in a team of more than 10 people and only one guy (out of the fifty in the room) raised his hand. So, yes, there are very few projects that need heavyweight methodologies meant for building the software analog of aircrafts. Chad said that giving names such as lightweight vs heavyweight is not very fair, so he used the terms project-based and product-based methodologies (those were new ones for me).

Creating a billion dollar ERP system - case study of Velocity
by John Waters, Level 300

I didn't read the abstract of this talk and was a bit surprised (but in a pleasant way) that it was a very practical talk using a real code base. I finally understood what was the difference between ajax postbacks and ajax call. It was also useful to see how ajax works in practice, where does it make sense to use it and what is the cost of doing so.

Challenging ASP.NET/AJAX for Braveheart Developers
by Dino Esposito, Level 300

Again I didn't read the abstract carefully and was surprised that the talk was about: HTTP handlers and modules. But this was a very interesting topic that I knew very little about (only ELMAH sounds familiar). Dino gave his talk very passionately and went without hesitation 10 minutes in the coffee break. One cool thing he showed was a HttpModule, that I think it was called ASPExlorer). It got activated by appending a parameter in the querystring "source=true" and it made the HTTP response return useful information about the requested page: its assembly file path, its dependencies, its source code, etc... Pretty cool way for troubleshooting in production environment.

Scaling Habits of ASP.NET Applications
by Richard Campbell, Level 300

Richard (whom I have listened to a lot in .NET Rocks) was probably the most eloquent and artistic speaker. He definitely knew his stuff, too. His session was definitely useful since I was unaware about a lot of stuff concerning ASP.NET scalability and performance. One quote worth remembering: "Computers are amplifiers - they just amplify the developer's intelligence or stupidity!"

I am sure that the session in Day 2 will bring more good sessions (just like the ones today)...