Microsoft TechEd Europe had a sell out event this year. Microsoft, the sponsors and the exhibitors welcomed over 7300 people to the event. It was undeniably an absolutely massive event, and the venue, the Messe Berlin, was positively humming with activity the entire week.
DevExpress had a great event with swathes of customers coming to chat to us on the booth during exhibition hours about our plans for the future and what they can expect from our Silverlight controls that will ship with DXperience v2009.3. As expected, Silverlight was a on a lot of developers’ minds … and considering around 40% of the TechEd Europe audience were developers that’s a pretty big number of minds to be on!
Pre-con day, Monday, saw what I think was an unprecedented number of attendees coming to the Exhibition Hall. Despite the gathering crowds at Brandenburg Gate, waiting to get involved in the celebrations for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, the TechEd attendees arrived at the convention centre in droves for the half day that it was open. How do I know that Day 1 was busier than usual? That’s easy, almost half of our DevExpress t-shirts we’re snapped up by early birds attending the opening day of the conference! And we spotted them around the Exhibition Hall for the rest of the week.
Gary, Oliver and myself were joined by John Martin from Professional Developer Training. John is a lynchpin in our plans for the European Training Roadshow in January 2010, where Oliver will be visiting London, Frankfurt, Zurich and Paris to deliver the DevExpress ASP.NET training course. John was a fantastic member of the team for the entire week and we were very grateful of his assistance. Anyone attending the DevExpress training courses is going to be met by a professional, affable and motivating friend for the duration of their course.
There are still spaces for anyone wanting to attend the training sessions. You can find more information and register for the sessions by clicking here.
Our technical booth staff were busy from the get-go with questions, feedback and the usual banter from the other exhibitors in the Visual Studio Partner Zone, but during the session times they were unusually quiet as they got down to planning demos for the next break in the sessions. Well at least that’s what I think they were doing. Knowing Oliver, he was probably searching Google for the best place to find a late beer for the evening.
We ran a daily prize draw during the conference and we were really pleased to see that a huge number of attendees took 10 minutes of their lunch break to come and participate. Interest in CodeRush and Refactor! Pro was big, and not surprisingly considering all the news about VS2010. We gave away copies of CodeRush with Refactor! Pro to 4 lucky winners, and one such winner was pretty excited by his prize.
Gavin Thomas had been in a session on agile development and had picked up a few tips from the speaker’s presentation about tools that could help him with productivity. Gavin came straight to us after the session closed and asked if he could check out Refactor! Pro. Luckily for him we were about to demo the tool to kick off our prize draw for the day. Gavin was made up when he won a copy of his own!
DevExpress – making developers happy for over 11 years!
More thoughts on the Microsoft TechEd Europe conference coming up later this week.
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