Top Ratings for BBD Sessions, Tech Ed Report Back
BBD sent its largest contingent ever to this year’s event with 35 staff attending Tech-Ed and one staff member attending the Microsoft Partner Summit which ran in parallel. BBD were proudly able to boast three presenters at this year's conference delivering a total of eight sessions.
BBD Speakers Well Received
The BBD speakers were William Brander, Robert Maclean and Rudi Grobler.
After winning the budding speakers competition at Dev-Idol's last year, this was William Brander's first Tech-Ed speaker slot and he earned some accolades.
- Rated third on the top 20 list by speaker. This list included all international speakers from Microsoft.
- Rated fifth for his session: "WUX401 - Hack Proofing your Microsoft ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC Applications" in the overall session stats.
Well done to Robert Maclean for making it to 15th place on the top 20 list by speaker. Robert also put together in his own time a Tech-Ed conference app which runs on Windows Phone 7. This app was extremely well received and downloaded by many who have a Windows Phone 7: http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=326ebe78-ff7a-4aa6-a803-8a57cf1ad405.
Rudi Grobler presented Mango MUST HAVE Developer Features Effective Validation Techniques with MVVM in Silverlight Expert Lessons: Top Tips for Building a Successful Windows Phone Application. He also facilitated The Mobile Device Revolution, rated tenth in the whiteboard sessions.
Tech-Ed Content Round-up
- Windows 8 featured in the opening keynote but was not covered any further during the event as Microsoft has not released a Beta version of the product yet.
- Microsoft's Windows Azure offering in South Africa also still remains under wraps. While there is a promise that this will be made available to customers in South Africa by the second quarter of next year, the data centre will continue to be hosted in Dublin creating high latency issues that will prohibit any large scale adoption.
- Microsoft Office 365 the Office version where you buy subscription to desktop MS Office that is linked to Cloud based versions of Exchange and SharePoint becomes available to the South African market.
- Introductory talks on SQL 2012 with new reporting tools that look and work more like Excel.
- "Metro" design explained by two Italian Microsoft staff who gave insight into the origins of Microsoft's design decisions for Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8.
