Microsoft Tech Days 2008 Toronto was held on Oct. 29 and 30 at Toronto Congress Center. Toronto is the first stop of this Microsoft Canada’s technical education conference series, which will go on to Montreal, Ottawa, etc across Canada in the next 3 months. As a developer working with Microsoft technologies, I had a chance to participate in this 2-days event and attended several training sessions for Windows developer and Web developer, even one for database.
The big difference for this event was that it was no longer for free. You need to pay $499.99 (early bird discount $249.99) for the admission. Microsoft said it was not free because this event targeted at education not marketing purpose. Moreover, attendees can get a Tech Days learning kit worth about $1000 (if it is really valuable for you), including a full version of Visual Studio 2008 Professional.
Although Microsoft stated that this event was not a marketing tour, most of the sessions were about new technologies, even some latest versions being launched 2 days ago. From my communication with other developers, I could see most of the developers and companies were just watching those new stuff. Companies are very carefully to take a stand on a new technology because that means a lot of investments and less support, and you cannot rely on a stable version in quite a while.
The good thing for Microsoft was although this was not a free event, it still allured so many people, over one thousand by estimate, to flock together to enjoy the new technologies and collect new information.
Let’s talk about the sessions. Among the 8 sessions I attended, including 4 for Windows development, 3 for Web development and 1 for data management, some of them were pretty impressive. For instance, “Mastering Your Samurai Skills of Silverlight” not only showed the great features of the latest version of Silverlight and what beautiful stuff the tools could build, but demonstrated the simple start-up process a beginner can take. Some sessions about WPF, such as one from MVP Barry Gervin, were attractive as well. The presentations were well prepared and most of the speakers had rich experience and good presentation skills.
As it was told, most of the speakers were not from Microsoft, but from other companies. That is good in that it could bring the audience real experience. However, this cannot guarantee good quality. To be honest, not all presentations were worth the money and time you spent.
Later on we will plan our next software version. I hope what we got from the conference could help us make a good choice.
