Yesterday Microsoft hosted the second edition of Microsoft Webcafe. The event was held at Combell and we made our conference room available as well as our bar.
The event aims to gather developers in an informal way. The webcafe concept is quite simple: a couple of short talks with a 10 minute timeslot each followed by drinks, snacks, socializing & gaming on the Kinect.
The talks
There were 6 short talks by different speakers which included myself (as a representative of the sponsor), some people from Microsoft and some external speakers. Because of the 10 minute maximum, it was necessary to get to the clue quite fast. This also allowed the audience to stay focused at all times.
Scaling in the cloud
I kicked the event off with my talks Scaling in the cloud. My goals was to show people why scalability is so important and how the cloud can facilitate all this. I’ve already put my slides online:
mijnTVGids
The next talk was called mijnTVGids and is a project developed by Appstrakt. It was presented by Thomas Van Sundert. Basically they showcased their TV guide app and focused on their Windows phone 7 release.
Did you know they’ve released the app for iPhone, Windows Phone, Android, Nokia & Facebook and that they’re going to release it for HP prints as well? Interesting stuff !
Discovering interesting people at Microsoft
The last talk before the break was by Microsoft’s Tom Crombez. He talked about the interesting people he had met while working at Microsoft. It was funny, entertaining and proved that big companies like Microsoft can have a great atmosphere too.
iRail Windows Phone 7 showcase
The first talk after the break was by LBi’s Cedric Vandewoude and was about BeTrains. It is a mobile app he ported to Windows Phone that uses the iRail API.
In essence the application displays information about the railway schedule. I must say it’s a great app.
Umbraco Open Source CMS
Next up was an Umbraco talk by Olivier Mangelschots and Rik Helsen. Both of them are part of Orbit One.
Umbraco is an open source CMS built on the .NET framework. It was simple and reminded me a bit of the well-known open source alternatives. Notable fact: the demo was flawless.
10 minutes to discover Web Apps and Tools
The closing talk was delivered by Microsoft’s Katrien De Graeve. It was very technical (which is a good thing). It showcased the latest development releases which included Webmatrix & ASP.NET MVC.
The fun
During the break and after the event, we used Combell café is the setting for networking and socializing. There were drinks and snacks and event 2 Xbox Kinnect sets.
We had fun, there was a Kinnect bowling competition and in the end we all participated in Kinnect Dance Central which resulted in a lot of laughs !
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