It’s over And I wrote this post too late.

Day 2 was good. Interesting sessions about the CLR (Bart De Smet) and about MEF (I forgot the guy’s name but he was hilarious).

Now for me this means more programming in the future. I really thing I made my job out of my hobby.

And lastly: nerd dinner! With a hole bunch of people!

Me and Scott Hanselman

Alright, my boss allowed me to go to the Techdays 2010 in Belgium . And day 1 was good! Very good actually.

I went to the following sessions:

The keynote (wasn’t that interesting, more of an introduction!).

Next session was about Silverlight 4 tour de force with a little WPF 4 on top. Nicely presented, good show, bottom line: unless you need WPF specific features use Silverlight. Why? Easier to deploy and Silverlight encourages to use Service based architecture.

Next up was C# 4.0 and beyond. While the future looks good, and dynamic sure has it’s powers with COM interop I feel like it’s a step back (no intellisense on those objects e.g.). I don’t know why but I’ve always liked the compiler time checking of static languages. But interop with Javascript sure is nice, as is with COM. But you have to find the right balance.

Compiler as a service on the other hand (compared to PHP’s eval (read: evil) is horrible. I already can see code written by beginners (I’m a beginner too, but I’ve seen so much PHP code with eval that I don’t like the language at all anymore…). So I really hope that this feature stays well hidden.

After that I went to EF in .NET 4.0. That was awesome. It really showed the power of EF, so I have a good start to dig into it (I don’t know why, but I like it A LOT).

Application Mangement with Visual Studio 2010 was next on my schedule. Merging, reports, installing TFS 2010 basic… All a breeze. Nothing much to tell about this, will post more when I have Visual Studio 2010.

Lastly: Test Driven Development in 2010. (don’t know why in 2010, it works the same in 2008…). it was good, but it cumbersome to start a project like that.

Now for a coffee and some surfing. First session today starts at 0900, so I need some coffee before that!

-Kristof