Fun times at Microsoft Tech Summit, Frankfurt

Last week, on Wednesday and Thursday, was the Microsoft Tech Summit (MTS) at the Messe Frankfurt. Hall 3 to be precise. And you had to be precise: although the Messe is a sprawling convention center with six halls, let alone the concert hall (pictured), due to security concerns you had to enter by one gate and one gate only.

With me was Przemysław Włodarczak, our whizz CodeRush developer from Poland, so you can imagine that the CodeRush demos he did in the booth were something to be experienced. Me, on the other hand, I had my hands full in demoing our WPF UI controls, as well as DevExtreme, especially for ASP.NET Core and Angular. We met existing customers (including a couple who were weaning themselves off their Silverlight apps!) and touched base with some possible new customers. Let’s hope we were able to sway them with our demos, if not the DevExpress Eat-Sleep-Code t-shirts we were giving away.

The surreal thing about this MTS event was the layout in the hall. To emphasize the themes of Cloud, Cloud management and development, the sessions were all held in eleven “Cloud” tents inside the Hall. These were inflatable white tents with rows of seating inside. An imaginative solution, to be sure, although I was told the really popular sessions meant that things got a little warm inside.

For us, with our hotel and the BASTA! event half a mile away, we got very used to the freezing cold winds funneled by the Messeturm as we walked back and forth to the hotel. Back in the day, when I worked for a certain bank in Frankfurt, this tower was known as the Pencil, for obvious reasons. It was the tallest building in Europe until 1997, when the Commerzbank Tower (also in Frankfurt) was completed.

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