VAN = Virtual ALT.NET (in case you where wondering).

REST with the OpenRasta framework, 25th of February 07:00 PM GMT (20:00 CET).

http://www.lostechies.com/blogs/colinjack/archive/2009/02/15/europe-van-25th-february-2009.aspx

For many years MSDN Live has been a free service provided by Microsoft. At one point they added a fee for no-show. The reason was obvious: ordering food, drinks and freebees cost money, and they had extra cost because of no-show.

This time (and probably for the coming rounds) they’ve added a attendee fee of NOK 1000,- (early bird), NOK 1500,- (after 15th of February) or 500,- if you’re a student. Why is this? On their website they explain (translated):

…the reason for this [the change] is to provide you with an even better service when attending the conference. The conference fee is explicitly giving you a better experience on MSDN & TechNet Live.

MSDN & TechNet Live gives you the equivalent of one week of education to the price of one hour consulting.

They continue listing several benefits of attending the event. I asked Børge Hansen, Architect Advisor at Microsoft, who also work on the DPE team responsible for the technical content for the event, if he could give me his explanation (translated):

As you know, Microsoft have for many years presented MSDN Live as a free service to the developer community. It has been an arena where we have presented many new technologies and best practices to solve the challenges one have as developer.

Now however, Microsoft Norway have also been hit by the financial disturbance and have to reduce cost. We have supported many different groups and activities, but one round of MSDN Live cost a lot of money and when we have done this two times per year, it goes without saying that this has high cost.

We know many appreciate this event and use it as a main part of their plan for maintaining their competence. Therefore we have decided to keep running MSDN Live, but we have to require a fee to ensure the event will continue and that it will not steel resources from other important activities for our developers. At the same time the focus on educational content and relevance is clearer.

We hope that many think this is a cheap investment in one’s own competence. We believe that for a whole day with relevant sessions, network building and lunch, this is cheap compared to equal alternatives.

My thoughts
Most developers have an employer they need to consult in order to go to this event. From the employers view the real cost is having the developer away from work for one day, not the 1000/1500 kroner that the event cost. From a developers point of view, it’s easier to ask your employer to go to a free event than to one that cost money. This will for some be the extra barrier needed to skip registration and ask for money. However, from the employers view I don’t think many really mind this cost.

The main thing however will always be the quality of the content provided and the speakers that present. To attract more people, Microsoft could do what the music festivals do; have at least one famous star to attract audience. By getting some foreign well known speaker, they could make it more interesting for many. Not a bad word about the speakers of this event, most of them I know personally, but this is just how things work.

So what DO you get for you money?
Is it worth the 1000,- kroner and one day away from work? The technologies covered are Silverlight 2, Windows 7, Windows Azure, WPF, ASP.NET and ADO.NET Data Services (with REST). These are one of the latest technologies available and should in itself be interesting, but for many of the sessions the technologies are not what’s interesting. It’s the practices used to work with the technologies. I personally think Microsoft have done a poor job in communicating this. If you look at the agenda, the only thing you see is technologies. To know more you need to click on each and every session. Historically Microsoft and MSDN Live have been known (by some) to do much marketing of their technologies in these events, showing fancy drag/drop functionality and how little you need to code. I feel this is not the case now, and haven’t been like that for a while.

Free tip to MS: Name your sessions better!

Session details

For Silverlight they focus on building business applications, which I this is what Silverlight is all about, but not focused on enough. Demos of Silverlight tend to show videos playing in a browser.. Hurray! Silverlight is all about putting user friendly apps into your browser and Jonas Follesø shows us his dive log app as an example of this. While on the topic you should also check out Jonas article where he ask if Silverlight is ready for business applications. Jonas will also show some tips and tricks for Silverlight. Should be some good content here.

For Windows 7, Rune Zakariassen will focus on what’s interesting for us as developers. Things like multitouch, jump lists, Windows error reporting etc. Personally this is not so interesting for me. It’s more on the nice to know list.

Cloud Computing with Azure on the other hand I find really interesting. If your doing web apps or any kind of online services (not only Internet), then Azure is something you should have a look at. I firmly believe this (Cloud Computing) is the future platform we as developers need to relate to.

WPF has been around for a while (and covered several times on MSDN Live) and I would not go to a session for WPF alone. The WPF session done by Pål Fossmo however, should probably not be called WPF at all (in my opinion). By reading the session description I see best practices in software development, not WPF specifically. Though the focus is on the Composite Application Guidance (by P&P) for WPF, you should be able to pick up a few tricks outside of WPF.

ASP.NET Instrumentation however is a much better session title and something every developer should focus more on. Most developers I know don’t spend much time in this area, until they experience the benefits of instrumentation during the maintenance of an application. In other words this is usually a “I wish we had it” thing that comes along either too late or very late in the dev game.

ADO.NET Data Services titled “Building applications with Data Services and REST”. Interesting, but I have some personal opinions on how this should be used :-) As long as you using it to share data only using e.g. REST it’s all fine, but a fear people will use this technology as a replacement for their business layer :-( Will be interesting to see how it’s communicated and scenarios for usage.

Conclusion
After reading thoroughly through every session in the agenda, I personally find it to be worth the cost. Let’s be fair, it’s cheap. The only problem is that it used to be free and now it’s not. If you want to keep up with what’s going on and to get some best practices around how you should code; this should give you good value.

I will attend!

What’s your take on this? Will you attend MSDN Live?