Wednesday, 13 February 2008
Microsoft TechDays, Paris
I spent the day in Paris on Tuesday attending the Microsoft TechDays, an odd conference for a Java developer and Linux bigot like myself, but also an interesting opportunity to see how the other side lives. (And, for the record, I'm not really biased against C#—I simply refuse to pay license fees simply to learn to use a technology, especially when there are better alternatives out there for free, and so I don't use it.)
The conference also featured a session on Java and .NET interoperability through Web Services, which is something I am currently dealing with on a day-to-day basis, so that was useful to see. I also attended sessions on Microsoft AJAX (for a different perspective than my usual DWR and Ajax4jsf worlds), software as services, and a good session on creating web services with domain-specific languages.
On the whole I thought that the conference, despite being bigger and more diverse than Sun's TechDays which I attended last summer, was noticeably lighter on hard technical information. Still, I am glad I went as it is always worthwhile to take a moment to step outside of one's usual technological bubble to get a taste of some different perspectives.
