First impression

I didn’t go to TechEd this year and thought I’d try out this conference in Sweden called Øredev (www.oredev.com). The agenda that I found on their website was pretty good. I really liked the tracks:

• Java
• .Net
• Methods & Tools
• Embedded Systems
• Architecture
• Test
• Project Management
• User Experience
• Case Studies
• Future & Trends
  

Should be enough to choose from for conference lasting two days :) It was difficult to choose which sessions to go to though, but for me it was really nice to have something else than MS related sessions to go to.

The Conference

The welcome speech and introduction by Øredev Project Manager, Michael Tiberg (and someone else that I don’t know who was), was not very impressive and kind of gave it all a bad start. It might be me being used to very fancy welcome speeches in other conferences, but these two guys was mediocre to say the least (or maybe it was just bad English). Anyway, Andy Hunt (the keynote speaker) is experienced and I soon forgot all about the shaky start. His presentation was good. He’s a funny guy (at least he was today) and gave us a walkthrough of the history of computing and development. Always nice to know where your roots are.

Feedback

The way they handled feedback at Øredev was quite nice. On your way out from the session you picked a card (green, yellow or red) that you drop in a bucket. Red is of course not good and green is, and I leave up to you to decide what yellow is.

Lunch

What can I say… Handouts of food, nowhere (at least not dedicated) to sit down and relax while eating, cold conference hall (had to put on my jacked to not freeze my but off). Not impressed.

The talks

The first session I had decided to attend was Model View Controller Framework by Matt Gibs, but this got changed with something else (at least they renamed it) and I decided in the last minute to go to Dynamic lang. for statically typed minds by Niclas Nilsson. This was quite good. I’ve not looked much at the dynamic languages out there yet (except from what I’ve read), and this was a nice introduction that gave me a bit of insight into the different ones. Niclas compared static typed languages to dynamic languages and showed the differences by examples. He also talked about the influence dynamic languages have had on C# and Java with extension methods, LINQ etc.

Next session up was Testable Architecture by Ron Jacobs. It turns out that Ron couldn’t make it for some reason (probably liked TechEd and Barcelona too much and decided to stay), so Michael Feathers and Dan North jumped to the rescue. Those two guys pulled that one off nice! They only got asked to do the presentation the night before, but that didn’t seem to bother them. They did the session like an interactive discussion panel (like they did here), and it gave me good value. One of my takeaways from this session was that I have to read Michael’s book about legacy code.

Next up was Implementing and extending VSTS. Not very impressed, though the two presenters (Mattias Olausson & Peter Blomqvist) have created a project on Codeplex which is the result of their implementation of VSTS. It wasn’t that it was bad, but they’ve could have done much better.

ParallelFX: Concurrency Library Ext. by Joe Duffy. I decided to go to this to see what MS has done and are thinking around parallel processing. I got an idea of what they’re doing and which problems they address. I would like to see this being implemented it the CRL somehow and automatically kick in when needed, but I guess that is the same as having threading work the same way, which is not very realistic. My point is that I just don’t want to be bothered by this. I just want my code to execute it the fastest way possible, making use of as all processors power available. Joe also briefly mentioned PLINQ and showed how it’s related to what they’re doing. To sum up: Parallel.For and Parallel.Do

What to Test and When by Udi Dahan. I believe that any good tester should be able to break an application within 10 minutes. Udi is no different and managed to crash Power Point not once, not twice, but tree times! The poor conference guy had to restart his machine every time. This interrupted the session a bit and was not planned (as you might be tempted to think). Anyway, Udi managed quite well and I got a few ideas and suggestions along the way. I’m looking forward to implement some real testing where I work (in addition to unit testing that is).

Last session of the day was The Agile Enterprise by Jeff Sutherland. Don't think I was the main target for his talk (more CTO, CEO, COO stuff), but I just had to see Jeff in real life and say hello. He is after all the founder of Scrum together with Ken Schwaber. During his talk I still managed to come up with a few new ideas for our team, even though it wasn’t really related to anything he said. This is just a typical example of how your mind get motivated and constantly come up with new ideas at conferences like these.