Rants and Raves

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Second Week of European Conference Tour
Second Week of European Conference Tour
October 26, 2009

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting again at the SDN Conference.  I had a great time at the conference. I ended up presenting (or co-presenting) six talks at the conference. The Silverlight talks were some of my favorites:

In addition, I gave a breakout session at the Windows 7 launch (where they gave away 100 copies of Windows 7).  My talk at the launch was:

  • Adding Windows 7 Features to Your .NET Applications

I was able to show off how to create TaskDialogs, Taskbar features like progress, thumbnails and jumplists.  I had a lot of fun doing that talk (et lekker!).

A couple of days before the talk, I noticed that Ted Neward and I had a similar talk on MGrammar so we decided to co-host both sessions. Since Oslo is early, there were a lot of skeptics in the rooms; not all did we convert but it did create some very interesting discussion of what is a Domain Specific Language and whether Oslo is the key to DSLs in the Microsoft space. The talks I did on Oslo included:

  • Why Oslo Matters
  • Writing Your First MGrammar (co-presented with Ted Neward) (download code)
  • The Busy .NET Developer’s Guide to DSLs in Oslo (co-presented with Ted Neward) (download code)

Of course conferences are not just about doing talks. They are also about visiting with *my* favorite speakers.  The usual bunch were there:

Carl Franklin

Carl in Holland

Steve Forte and Richard Campbell

Steve and Richard are Tired

Beth Massi

Beth in Holland

Ted likes his soup:

Ted Likes Soup

Paco Likes Soup too (aka Hadi Hariri)

Paco Likes Soup Too

Its been a fun time, and almost 1/2 over.