TechDays 08

TechDays 2008: Slides and Code of my presentation available online

Laurent Bugnion — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 08:46:20 GMT

The slides and demo source code of my presentation at TechDays last week are available online.
You will find:

Slides (Powerpoint 2007)
Source code (Visual Studio 2008 C#)
Download page

I hope that these documents will help you in your "quest for WPF". Let me know if you have questions or comments through the blog!!

TechDays 08: Talked about WPF and now back home

Laurent Bugnion — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 11:02:58 GMT

The Swiss edition of the TechDays 2008 is over. It was a great success,many people came, and as far as I can say, people had a good time. I didn't attend any sessions though, because I hung out in the main area instead and met a number of people (some of them I knew from MIX or other occasions), and talked talked talked. Yesterday evening, there was a party, I didn't stay too late though because I wanted to be well rested for my talk this morning.

My talk titled "Siemens goes WPF, Lessons learned" went great. It was in the first slot of the day, starting at 9. Many people came (I didn't count, but the room was 90% full, I'd say). People even laughed at my lame jokes (since no designers came to the session, I was free to joke about them, bwahaha :) Seriously, I regretted that no designers attended, but it's not very surprising. TechDays are rather developer-oriented (something I hope will change in the future, and Microsoft will open up and invite more designers soon).

I had a lot of positive feedback after the session, but if any of you who saw me want to comment more (and I definitely accept negative comments, don't be shy), feel free to use the feedback or to email me.

Thanks to all who attended, and thanks for the nice words!

TechDays 08: My talk next Thursday in Basel, Switzerland

Laurent Bugnion — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:44:16 GMT

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."