Symposium Progress Report

  • Article

We've been making some great progress on the Symposium ... so I guess you could call this a progress report. I wrote most of this up as a response to an email asking if this event was focused on ISVs and if it would be recorded. I ended up answering these questions a quite a few more ... so I thought I would just provide my response:

I wouldn’t say the event is focused on the ISV because we also cater to the enterprise developer/architect. I also wouldn’t say it’s 100% developer focused. We find that architects and project managers also get a lot of value. Our target audience is people building solutions on the .NET platform who care a great deal about their craft - whether it’s coding, patterns, architecture, process, teamwork, testing, or the best way to think about some of the new technologies. Here’s a very brief rundown of what we have planned:

  • Oct 18 (Workshops): Three simultaneous half-day hands-on workshops on Enterprise Library, Prism and Windows Azure
  • Oct 19 (Architecture and Software Engineering): Uncle Bob Martin keynote, Inversion of Control/Dependency Injection pattern, Reusing UI, Solution considerations, Parallel tasks and Architecture Katas.
  • Oct 20 (Server side stuff): Azure keynote, REST, Cloud Guidance, Command Query Separation Pattern, Codename “Dallas” and Agile ASP.NET MVC development
  • Oct 21 (Client side stuff): Windows Phone 7 keynote, Windows Phone Guidance, JQuery, MVVM, Prism 4, Design data & the repository pattern
  • Oct 22 (Visual Studio): VS2010 keynote, Feature Builder Power Tool, Agile team patterns with TFS
  • List of many of the sessions and their descriptions (more being added regularly) also, check out the speakers we have lined up

There will be a game show night hosted by Scott Hanselman called Who’s Code is it Anyway? on Oct 20th (with dinner and drinks) and a bowling party with dinner and drinks on Oct 21st. Of course lunch is provided every day. One of the big changes this year is creating more time for everyone to interact with … well, everyone else. The breaks between sessions is 20 minutes and lunch is 80 minutes. Lunch is also done in an ask-the-expert style setup where each table with have a topic so you’re more able to sit with other like-minded individuals. The long breaks and lunches will also give us the time we all need to plan the 3 Open Space sessions we end Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday with.

We will be recording the screens and the audio of each of the sessions. We won’t record the full-motion of the speaker, workshops, open space discussions, or lunch (duh). We’re not yet sure how or when we’ll release them. Certainly many of them will be available online shortly after the event. We’re not sure where yet (probably MSDN or Channel9), we’ll see. We still need to work with our external speakers on the posibility of publishing their talks.

For completeness, I should also mention that we’ve worked out some pretty good deals with sponsors. For example, each attendee will receive a month of OnDemand! training from Pluralsight ($100 value) and we’re working on arranging free books/ebooks from some well-known publishers including (of course) many p&p books. As always, attendees will leave the event with a thumb drive containing all the presentations and code samples. These events have been really successful in the past. Last year’s NSAT was 153 and 97% of attendees said they would recommend this event to others.

Well, I hope this gave you some ammunition to convince the powers that be to let you join us :) If so, you can register here.

Let me know if you have any questions. Hope to see you there!