Microsoft TechDays Canada is a Wrap

Last week in Vancouver marked the conclusion of Microsoft TechDays Canada. Starting last October, our team visited six cities across Canada delivering five separate tracks covering a wide spectrum of technologies.

 

Microsoft TechDays Canada was an event focused on supporting the skills you need to be successful with today’s technology. To that end, our developer tracks focused on technologies like ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and Windows Forms. They also focused on a few technologies that you may not have heard much about but are as equally relevant to developers. They include the Microsoft Sync Framework, the Windows Vista Bridge, and ADO.NET Data Services. In combination, we believe that the developer tracks did a great job in providing an overview of our developer stack.

Developers Love Silverlight

In most cities, the 2-part Silverlight session entitled, "Mastering Your Samurai Skills of Silverlight" was totally packed. Like me, developers absolutely love Silverlight. It’s a wonderful technology that enables you to build RIAs using your existing .NET skills. For the Web Developer Track, we chose to deliver three sessions on Silverlight. Based on their popularity, perhaps the next time around, we should consider an entire track on Silverlight!

Windows Mobile FTW

As part of the Windows Developer Track, we invited Canadian and Windows Mobile guru Mark Arteaga to deliver a couple of sessions on building applications for the Windows Mobile platform. His sessions were very well received. He did a great job showing folks how to build applications for mobile devices while sharing his top tips & tricks.

Got Feedback?

Please let me know what you’d like to see from Microsoft TechDays Canada the next time around. We're listening. Got an idea for a session or track? What did you think of the venues? Send me an e-mail and let me know what feedback you have.

John Bristowe John Bristowe
Developer Evangelist, Microsoft Canada
john.bristowe@microsoft.com
twitter.com/jbristowe