On September 14, 2012 I attended conference for .NET developers here in Vienna, called Professional .NET 2012.

I’m very glad that company has sent me to this conference. Well, it was not any kind of exclusive and expensive conference somewhere abroad, but rather excellent money for value event for employees, who like to improve their professional skills. When I just started I asked about going to Oslo for NDC, which is awesome conference. For new developer it was bit too over budget and I understand it – who knows, maybe in reality I’m crap-code writer, which shall be fired the next morning.

Conference took place in some hotel, and from what I understood, not cheap one. So accordingly it resulted in great tasty lunch. This is always a big plus for any conference. Despite it was called “Professional .NET” I have seen a lot of young people which didn’t seem to have years of experience at all. If I were student I wouldn’t take much out of that day.

Intro and 2 side talks were in German, so I cannot say anything about those, for me it was boring. All other sessions were in English.

Two special presenters were invited and they were core for the conference.

Ayende Rahien just turned all things upside-down. Whatever you learnt from any smart patterns books older than few years is just not acceptable. Everything could be written in very simple manner with depth averaging 4. True or false?

Personally I liked very much the way Ayende presented stuff and how he talked about things and also that he made people think. Even flow of his speech was like some continuing brainstorm. What I didn’t like completely is that he is very concentrated only on one side of the problem, talking like all software is just about reading data from database. Yes, I say something against known Ayende, because I’m sure he shows only one side of the coin. Besides, he likes to blame other people, so why not other people blame him a bit.

If you don’t know Ayende, for sure you have heard about his projects. Oren (his real name) has written Rhino Mocks, RavenDB, NhibernateProfier and contributed to tons of open source projects.

Sebastien Lambla was another special guest. To be honest, I’ve never heard about him before (but I realize now that I read his posts time-to-time). Apparently he has contributed a lot to open source and community, as people, who attended with me knew about him. You maybe heard about OpenWrap or OpenRasta. I just went though this interview with him, to understand more about what he does. Steve Ballmer, you should finally respond him with Microsoft’s vision on open-source!

It was interesting conference, but not a revolution.