TechDays Montreal, Day 2

Day 2 of Techdays Montreal began with the A/V techs (and yes, me) ooh-ing and ahh-ing at presenter Maxime Rouiller’s Alienware laptop, He showed us the utility for controlling its backlighting colours:

Once set up, the Building for the Microsoft-Based Platorm track’s acting host Laurent Duveau introduced Maxime, who then presented Introducing ASP.NET MVC.

Maxime will present the same session in Ottawa, so if you’re there, you too can get a look at that Alienware. Wonder what it would take to get Microsoft to assign me one of those babies.

Continuing the morning’s ASP.NET MVC theme, Simon Laroche took to the lectern:

Simon presented SOLIDify Your ASP.NET MVC Applications, which used the refactoring of an ASP.NET MVC application to demonstrate the SOLID principles of object-oriented design in action:

Next came lunch, once again held on Centre Mont-Royal’s fourth floor:

Here are Developer Evangelist Christian Beauclair and IT Pro Evangelist Rick Claus preparing for the lunchtime presentation:

And here they are doing that presentation, in which they show off some of the new features in Office 2010. I rather the like the goodies in PowerPoint 2010:

In the meantime, some of the attendees hung out in the Windows 7 lounge, trying out the touchscreen machines and playing games – including the indie hit I MAED A GAME WITH Z0MB1ES!!!1 – on the XBox 360:

Mario Cardinal led the first session of the afternoon:

His presentation was on Building RESTful Applications Using WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). Mario knows his stuff, and as a seasoned presenter, had no problem crossing the stage and doing part of his delivery far away from the lectern and any speaker’s notes:

Mario will also present the same session at TechDays Ottawa.

Some of the staff saw me walking around with Rick’s DSLR camera and asked me to take their picture. I was happy to do so – TechDays doesn’t happen without their help:

One nice thing about Centre Mont-Royal is that there’s plenty of “hanging out” space. If you’re not spending at least a little time in these spaces between sessions, getting to know the other techies in your community, you’re not getting all you can out of TechDays:

The final session in my track had Francis Beaudet speaking:

He presented Developing and Consuming Services for SharePoint:

Day 2 wrapped up at 4:00 p.m., at which point we quickly dismantled the machines we’d set up on Tuesday and packed them up for shipping to Techdays Ottawa. Some of the team stayed to do the end-of-conference review, which Christian and I had to run to catch the Microsoft open source cocktail party at the W, which I’ll cover in the next blog entry.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.