This is going to be blog post about my trip to Microsoft conference in Kyiv. More than week passed since that time, but I still clearly remember that cool event. Just want to share my thoughts and impressions on the trip. Maybe some of you, Dear Readers, would love to hear more about the event. Please ask.

“At the moment I’m in very comfortable train to Kyiv. I’ve never been in this kind of train. Finally they have established public transport at some good level. Train has personal lights, general lighting system, different indicators (e.g. indication if toilet isn’t occupied), well-working energy set, so I can plug in my laptop system. And the best – it is relatively quick train.” – I wrote at first night going to conference. Don’t know why would I be so impressed by train, wondering as monkey from zoo, but “hey there gonna be great day tomorrow”, thought I at that night. We were in Kyiv at 7:30 AM and freezing cold met us. It was about ‘–10’ by Celsius (14 by Fahrenheit). Not the best weather for conference and I got sick after those days and then two days in mountains at weekend.

Clouds – our future?

Conference started with kick-off speech from director of Microsoft Ukraine. This guy was extremely nice and knew how to keep audience attention. Main idea of his speech was CLOUD.

Picture is taken from here: http://keddr.com/2010/12/microsoft-swit-2010-v-fotografiyah/ where you can see many other cool pictures including windows phone and Kinect (controller-girls only :) )

Small and cool gray could. Or even “home” could that can be kept in van where you plug electricity, network and cooling system – that is all you need, plus one cabin for controlling. Of course Microsoft itself has bigger toys, something like on picture below:

1) Windows Phone 7

The guy who talked about WinPhone 7 is Silverlight MVP Sergii Lutai. I liked the way he talked about the phone, and I would say that I already seen those slides presented here in my company by someone else. But slides doesn’t make difference, unless there is everything written and I read everything, but the presenter makes difference. Sergii knew the material and it was really pleasant to hear him. I listened to basics of WP7 once again – but this time I took a lot for myself.

Ukrainian MVP List

First of all I was surprised that even in Ukraine we have some MVPs (I thought there are only few). Actually I did research and it turns out that there are only/about 15 MVPs in Ukraine, follow this link to see whole list.

2) What’s new in ASP.NET 3.0

Definitely the most energized presentation – Dima as always was in good mood, not taking into account that he had lost his passport before. I really like the way he keeps contact with audience, but I often expect more constructive and detailed talks from him. He hates me for this :) … kidding… just kidding…

3) Entity Framework

“CSDL (conceptual schema definition language) SSDL (store schema definition language) MSL (mapping specification language)” – wrote I when was there. It doesn’t make a lot of sense being detached from whole story, but I want to keep it as it was before… Hope many guys know what those things are. Sergiy is really cool and solid presenter, yeah.. he is not that young and fun guy as Dima, but it doesn’t impact his possibility to keep audience interested.

4) Developing web apps with ASP.NET AJAX and JQuery

I did not find this presentation to be as good as others. And topic is too jaded. But anyway it was good to listen to that. I know only this – “I love JQuery” :)

Hotel

Title “Hotel” doesn’t mean presentation, but it is about our hosting in hotel. It was the best hotel I ever been. Ok, that is only second time I was in hotel. I do not travel, my family did not have money for that and me either did not have money for trips or something. So maybe supercline, tidy bed, tv, refrigerator, awesome shower and rest room doesn’t make any kind of impression on people. Main thing that was there – wifi. He-he, I showed room to my girlfriend via Skype.

You know what happened after that? – We got drunk. I did not know that people can so phenomenally talk about immortal philosophical, slightly math-physical things after couple of glasses full of Whisky. Was extremely interesting and cognitive.

In the morning I felt myself crappy, but anyway went to the conference. It turned out that Kyiv is also traffic jam city.

5) Modeling UML in VS 2010

“was interesting.. pity that it is only in Ultimate” – I thought at that time and still think so. It is really bad that lot of fascinating things live inside of Ultimate version of VS and it is that expensive. Building Sequence diagrams with one shot, keeping class diagrams all the time up to date, and elegant component diagrams – that is amazing.

6) F#

WoW!!! @ddtru you rock! That was really fascinating, hardcore, bit academic exciting presentation about functional programming language running on CLR. I’m not sure about this, but it sounds like he is or was teacher in some university. I would love to be one of his students. Actually if you understand Ukrainian you can go to this page and read about each of the presenters, him including.

7) Parallel programming/ Task Library

Young, bright (in both meanings) guy talked about how we came from “Thread.” to “Task.” and then he mentioned about async and await. Presentation was real threading hardcore – I love threading hardcore. Actually I had my Master Diploma related to multithreading, so I knew almost everything he talked about, but there were lot of things that were out of my attention, and now I refreshed that all in my mind. Also what I liked about this presentation is that it was in Ukrainian. It is really sad, that I live in Ukraine and most of the presentations were in Russian. I have nothing against this language, but I have a lot against ruining Ukrainian nation establishment as separate country. Honestly I see myself in this man, I would prepare similar presentation with same kind of hardcore, only maybe I feel more comfortable in front of big audience. This is something he lacked.

8-9) Testing with Visual Studio 2010

Again, Ultimate version of VS allows us create UI test scenarios, that can run automatically. We can also create multi-machine environment that can be reestablished at some moment of time, then our system deployed to it and completely tested. That is awesome.

Maybe I missed some of the presentations where I’ve been, but I put list of those where I’ve been and what I’ve remembered.

Photos

I found some photos from event, you can proceed to them by clicking on the image below. There is also small bug on the picture, try to find it (talking about myself).

And more photos here: http://msswit.cloudapp.net/Photo.aspx