MDC My Opinion (Look through my eye glasses)
Middle east Developers Conference MDC07, is almost over, tomorrow is the last day, and this is somehow my opinion so far as an old MDC fan because I attended MDC04, 05, 06 and 07.
I'll divide the discussion to points which I'm going to say what was good and what was not good in each of them.
- Organization
- Presented Topics
- What can be added to MDC08
Organization
The organization overall was acceptable, I can see the exhaustion in Ahmed Adel's, Mohammed Wahby's and Sherif El-Tony's eyes, especially in the first day they were totally burnt in this
- Positive
- MDC web site is the best so far, compared to last years, and will be the best if the sessions content and videos are published on it after the MDC
- Keynote was nice and new.
- New ideas are used to keep the attendees up all days and willing to attend all event days, stuff like the quizzes, prizes, surveys ... etc
- Negative
- Water people, I can't find a glass of water in the whole building, I had to walk to the ICT event and search for a cafeteria then buy some water, which is about 15 minutes of walking and asking people.
- Registration process was awful especially in Day 0, I was one of the first people arriving there, I was there about 8:45 AM, and I finished my registration after about 2 hours
- The place is not the best, in my opinion it is not even compared to the Air-force House, where we had MDC04, 05
- Hands on labs were not effective and all what they care about is filling in the form with your details.
Presented Topics
The topics titles were great, we had ALMOST everything in the development world like, WPF, WCF, WF, WCS, LINQ, SQL-CLR, VSTS (a lot), Share Point, VSTO, Agile, Architecture, SQL Server, C++, Mobile Clients, Compilers, Optimization Techniques ... etc
But, sometimes the session title was far away of the session itself, like what happened with
"SQL-CLR in Action" the session didn't discuss the SQL CLR itself.
- Positive
- Good diversity in topics
- Great speakers
- Fresh topics
- Talking about Agile is a big wow, especially for me, because I'm one of the big fans of Agile.
- Negative
- WCF was almost canceled
- Dynamic languages are not included as usual
- Too much VSTS
- C# 3.0 was not introduced just LINQ, which was somehow a little bit weird, because it is harder to talk about LINQ without giving an introduction about what C# 3.0 offers, like lambda expressions, extension methods and expression trees ... etc
What can be added to MDC08
This is a good question, so I'll try to present some ideas, that I hope somebody will hear and include in next MDC's
- Iron Python, I think it worths a try especially if we invited Jim Hugunin to talk about it
- More technicality, at least dive into the topic a little bit.
- I wish we can have Andres Hjelsberg in a session, this will be amazing, even if it is live streaming from Redmond
- Sessions are streamed live on the web site, so you can see the sessions from home.
- Bloggers corner inside the session room with internet connectivity and maybe some PC's so geeky bloggers can blog instantaneously ;)
That's it for now, I hope if you have any other stuff don't hesitate to comment.