Has it been a year already? Guess it has. Actually 13 months to be exact since I was in Orlando for the last DEVIntersection.
While the venue was the same and the Mai Tai just as refreshing, there were a few changes to the event this year.
Billed as the intersection of tools and technologies, this conference had plenty of valuable content to help enhance your skillset. There were sessions covering Visual Studio, ASP.NET, Azure, SQL, SharePoint and Office365 presented by some of the best and brightest Subject Matter Experts in the industry.
The event this year was one month later than last year and that made a minor difference. The climate was much hotter in May than April which caused them to move lunch to the 5th floor of the adjoining resort (Disney Dolphin). It was a bit of a walk which wasn’t really a big deal, but I did miss being able to eat outside right next to the water.
Attendance this year was similar to last year and there were the same amount of companies having sponsorship booths. There were workshops available both Pre and Post Conference and I took advantage of this content as well.
The Pre-Conference workshop I attended was an Introduction to ASP.NET Core and the Post Workshop was on Developing Modern Cloud Applications in Azure.
Both workshops were highly valuable and covered two technologies where Microsoft is investing heavily.
My personal feeling was that the session content this year was not as strong as last year and there was a fair amount of content overlap between sessions. I am beginning to see this change at Developer Conferences and I believe it is a side effect of the accelerated release schedule that most Microsoft products are now following.
In the past, we had products that were only released one or two times per year so when you went to a conference there were exciting announcements and content for upcoming product releases.
Now, since products are released quite frequently it seems like those large announcements are few and far between and the training content is reduced to a level of evolutionary incremental changes rather than large revolutionary changes.
These were my favorite keynotes:
- Hanselman and Friends (Hanselman is hilarious!)
- Azure Stack (think on premise Azure in your own datacenter)
And these were my favorite Sessions:
- How Using DevOps Practices Can Make You a Better Developer
- C# 7 – Simplify and Improve Your Code
- Faster, Smaller, Better – Visual Studio 2017
This was a worthwhile conference full of valuable information, but due to the rapid release cycle of Microsoft products I personally will probably attend every other year going forward and alternate with a different training venue next year.
