Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft)

Next week, on Wednesday the 19th and Thursday the 20th of March, the TechDays Switzerland will take place in the St. Jakobshalle in Basel. Apprently, it's sold out and they expect around 2300 people in 5 parallel tracks. Now that's kind of making me nervous, because I will be presenting a session on Thursday the 20th at 9AM!.

It's not the first time I'll be talking at a conference, but it's certainly the first time that so many people will attend, so... kind of nervous here :

The talk is called "Siemens goes WPF: Lessons learned" (in English, by the way) and is about the experiences that we made between when we introduced WPF in our project in 2006 and now, where we use it intensively in our project. I'll focus on the developer-designer interaction, the MVVM pattern, Blend and Visual Studio working together, and I'll show a demo of a "best practice" application we are using internally. Additionally, I'll talk about some social aspects of WPF (personal note to Nathan: If you still don't know what the social implications of WPF are, please feel welcomed to attend my talk next week :)

I really hope to see you (yes, you) next week, and that people will laugh at my lame jokes. No, seriously I hope it'll be interesting and fun and that we'll make this a memorable experience together!

Here's the abstract:

"Introducing WPF in a firm large or small brings a set of new challenges: Learning curve, new tools, new workflows and roles, new collaboration designer-developer, etc...

2 years ago, Siemens Building Technologies decided to take a close look at WPF, and to use it in a new project. With the help of top experts in the field, in and out of Microsoft, we identified some of the challenges and did our best to find appropriate responses. In this presentation, we will talk about technical but also social implications of using WPF, and how to make the transition as smooth as possible. We will also see some of the advantages of using WPF over classic technologies like WinForms or MFC."