First Day at SDN Conference

I'm here in the Netherlands in a town called Noordwijkerhout near Amsterdam at the SDN Conference with a lot of great speakers and sessions.

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I took these shots while the attendees were in session. There's good food, great vendors and lots of entertainment -- XBoxes, bowling, pin-pong, and lots of bars ;-) We also had a really funny English comedian perform at the end of the night. The Dutch really know how to put on a great event.

I have a total of three sessions and two on the first day. First I did a session called LINQ to Everything where I walked through each of the LINQ providers in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 "box" including LINQ to SQL, LINQ to DataSet, LINQ to Entities and LINQ to XML. We discussed application architecture and considerations and I showed demos to introduce each of the technologies. The room was packed and I got great scores so I'd say it went well. :-)

Next session I did was a lot of fun. It was called Taking Advantage of LINQ and Open XML in Office 2007and I showed how to manipulate Open XML document formats in Office 2007 Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents using the Open XML SDK version 2.0 and LINQ to XML. I think it sparked a lot of people's curiosity and creativity because there are a lot of possibilities. I showed how you can create, query and transform documents without having to have Office installed at all. I also had great reviews and chatted with many attendees afterwards who were building a lot of cool business applications.

I attached the presentation and demos so have a look.

Enjoy!

SDCDay1.zip