Back from BASTA! 2010
27 Sep 2010What an inspiring event! It was my first technical conference and I enjoyed it a lot.
Sadly due to time constraints I could only attend two of the 4 days (+ 1 preconference), but alas were they two intense days!
The first set of tracks I attended was the Azure Day, with sessions dedicated to Microsoft’s PaaS offering. A couple of interesting subjects were touched by the different speakers, but my personal favorite was the compliance and security overview from Enno Rey and Dominick Baier.
The same evening, Oliver Sturm gave a brilliantly entertaining talk about .NET languages as different tools for different jobs, and suddenly gained points in my personal Cool Guys ranking list. I already knew him from DevExpress and I thought he was a smart guy, yet he proved himself a capable entertainer too.
Day 2 was Silverlight day. Lots of interesting stuff was presented, plus ironically I got more practical information about Azure than the day before during the most interesting session of the whole two days: kudos to the guys from Maximago GmbH (Daniel Greitens and Timo Stönner) for their talk on Recombinable Silverlight Applications with Azure. They managed to touch Silverlight, MVVM, Prism and concepts of Azure in a nice manner that just made sense to me. Moreover they clearly illustrated the limitations of Silverlight in their own project, YourAzure, such as the known SEO issues and problems with deep linking for their forum. That goes probably to confirm the fact that Silverlight is best used for Web Applications and shares some downsides with Flash. I can’t wait for yourazure.com to go live and have a look at what the guys managed to do.
Christian Wenz too deserves an honorable mention for his funny and at the same time stimulant talk about the limitations and capabilities of Silverlight Out-Of-Browser applications. Christian gave us an overview of what is possible to do within OOB applications with elevated trust, and he showed the amazing frightening feature of calling COM objects from Silverlight code. I guess that would only be useful for intranet LOB applications running on Windows, but it is nonetheless a scary thought.
Between the sessions I managed to pass by the DevExpress booth to grab a shirt and to ask when we are going to see a Silverlight scheduling control: sadly Gary Short confirmed what I was afraid to hear, namely that the scheduling control for Silverlight won’t get out before 2011. Oh well, I hope that at least the beta for the WPF scheduler is coming out soon enough.
I hope to be part of another event of the same type soon enough, I guess it could quickly become an addiction.