And now, more pictures from TechDays Ottawa, the fifth in our series of eight cross-Canada conference for developers and IT pros building on the Microsoft platform.
Here’s an overhead view of the Rogers booth, where they were running a handy phone recharging service, talking about their Catalyst API for mobile developers and showing off the very lovely Samsung Focus running Windows Phone 7. I’m looking forward to getting mine…
One of the popular diversions at TechDays was the Kinect. Here are Stewart Cawthray and Rick Claus getting in a little exercise during the lull that happens when attendees catching presentations:
TechDays wouldn’t run anywhere nearly as smoothly without the help of its track hosts. I’d like to thank the two gentlemen pictured below, Peter Henry and Colin Melia, who were the track hosts for the developer tracks. Colin hosted the “Developing for Three Screens and the Cloud” track, while Peter hosted the “Optimizing the Development Process” track. Thanks, guys!
Also helping ensure that the conference ran smoothly were these two – William Hoang, the Academic Developer Evangelist Associate (a.k.a. “The Intern”) and Jenna Prada from Starshot, our event planning group. Thanks, you two!
Meanwhile, the sessions were in full swing:
There are a select few who deserve some kind of endurance prize for presenting at all eight TechDays cities, and Imaginet’s Aaron Kowall is one of them. He’s been doing a number of presentations on getting the most out of Visual Studio 2010 for building and deployment.
Another eight-city trooper is Redbit Development’s Mark Arteaga, who’s delivering the Windows Phone 7 development sessions:
Here’s a crowd that’s sitting up and attentive, even though they’ve just come from a big lunch:
The reason they’re so attentive? Because it’s a lively presentation by Mario Cardinal on the top 10 unit testing mistakes. Mario’s presentations are always fun to watch:
Conference internet access is a pricey thing, so we’re grateful to our sponsor OnX for providing the internet access stations so people can check their mail and Facebook:
The end of TechDays’ Day 1 is not the end of our day! Day 1 also has a students-only evening event called Go DevMental, where students can learn more about web and mobile development. Here’s the registration booth for the event, where each student gets a free copy of Visual Studio 2010 Professional and the full version of Expression Studio. Where were the goodies like this when I was a student?
Here are the students taking the Kinect for a spin before the start of the sessions:
And here’s Mark Arteaga presenting Windows Phone 7 development in Silverlight to a packed room of students:
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Going on the road’s a little different these days thanks to mobile computing and communications technology. Damir’s at the wheel, enjoying stand-up comedy on satellite radio, while I’m riding shotgun, with my laptop linked to the internet via a 
