MDC07 Review

As you know, MDC07 started in last 4th Feb. and remains for 4 days. The conference in general was very good, however some faults and management drawbacks affected its ultimate success.

Actually, I didn't attend Day 0, which has some problem in registration process (depending on attendees comments in this day). So, I will start talking about Day 1. In this day, The Keynote was so bad for a big conference like MDC. They have interviewed some young children who have basic programming skills, introducing windows vista and office features, interviewing with some business guys from ITWorx and Investment Ministry. The keynote wasn't informative at all as most of the attendees are developers and they are not interested in such stuff.

Afterwards, I attend "Patrick Hynds" session. The session was talking about some tips for ASP.NET. Although, Patrick is one of the most popular speakers, in this MDC, he wasn't that good in choosing his session subjects. I felt that he didn't have anything new to talk about.

I attend also "Agile Methodology" session, one of the most exciting and informative sessions in this MDC. The speakers was two members in "Microsoft patterns & practices" in Microsoft HQ. The session was discussing the Agile Methodologies, XP Methods and Pair Programming.

Then, attending Delving into VSTS for Software Testers. It was nice to see the Microsoft investment in Testing Module in VSTS. Not only API testing, but also some interesting testing techniques for the load and performance of your applications.

In Day 2, some sessions were cancelled or removed, which was so confusing! I attended a session about VSTS tools for System Architects. The speaker was Microsoft guy called "Abhishek Mathur". So interested session. Afterwards, attended another session about ASP.NET AJAX-Style Server Controls for "Patrik Hynds". It was interested to know how to build your own ajax-style server controls if the current one doesn't fit your requirements. Then, I attended a session about Workflow Foundation. It wasn't so informative. Only some introduction. We expected more than that.

The conference as overall was above average, not so perfect. However, the organization was better than the last years. The place - Cairo conference center - is better and perfect for this large event. Very nice ideas introduced in this conference such as encouraging students to join ImagineCup competition and supporting the online Egyptian communities. I think the sessions needs to target more the developers needs, removing all the propaganda stuff. We hope for better organization in the next years.