0 comments
Various 
Last Thursday and Friday, Microsoft TechDays NL 2015 was held at the World Forum in The Hague. TechDays is the biggest Microsoft related software conference, with over 2100 attendees. For us at Xpirit, the conference was a big success, fortunate to be selected to present a total of 21 sessions with a crew of 6 Xpiriters. This blogpost contains some reflections on the conference and the slide decks for my own sessions.
TechDays 2015 was great fun. I think Microsoft managed to pull of a nice conference. I made a Storify overview of Xpirit’s activities at TechDays.
With an awesome, energising keynote by ex-Google employee and now Microsoft Distinguished Engineer James Whittaker, TechDays was off to a great start. James took us on a journey about how the web has evolved into the way we now consume data through apps, and how the app model might evolve into newer experiences in the future. It’s all about data consumption and intelligent software that gets that data into our hands the moment we need it. The Internet of Things will work for us and obsolete whole industries over time, leaving time and room for humanity to explore the world, the seas, science and the galaxy. Inspiring and very funny.
We chose to accompany our sessions with an in depth, 44 page magazine, handed out to all attendees. It covers some of the topics we spoke about at TechDays, as well as new technologies like Ionic and the cool new Hololens.
If you were unable to obtain a copy, you can also download it from our website. If you’d like a hard copy, give me a ping.
Being a hobby sketch-noter/cartoonist/graphics fanatic, I really appreciated seeing the live sketchers from Wandverslag create a beautiful drawing with details from the sessions and discussions in the hallways.
In the same style, all conference speakers got a nice personalised gift, our own cartoon.
As Xpirit, we chose to take on the topic of Microservice architecture, demystify some of its aspects and provide possible approaches for building microservices. I had the opportunity to talk about two of my favourite topics: mobile development (Xamarin!) and distributed systems architectures (NServiceBus!). Here are my sessions:
Lessons learned: migrating an N-tier web application to microservices with NServiceBus
In this session, I explained how I transformed an existing N-tier web application to a more scalable and manageable architecture in the microservices style. I presented the reasons for migrating and a 5-step migration plan. This session is not specifically about NServiceBus, but rather about the architectural approach.
Microservices with NServiceBus in Particular
In this session, I showed how you can build a loosely coupled, message driven microservices architecture with the NServiceBus framework and the tools from the Particular platform.
Enterprise Mobility & Cross Platform Development from the Trenches
This session is about some hard lessons learned while developing cross platform apps in an enterprise environment. The colliding worlds of EMM platforms and cross platform tools can give you some headaches if you’re not careful.
Building out-of-the-ordinary UI’s with Xamarin.Forms custom renderers
Xamarin.Forms is a powerful framework that uses UI abstractions to enable 100% code reuse for UI code whilst still delivering 100% native user experiences. In general, for simple data driven apps, Xamarin.Forms is a good fit. But what if you need to build a UI that is a little less ordinary? Can you still do that with Xamarin.Forms? This session explains how you can use Custom Renderers to go beyond standard.
Check out the blogs of my other Xpirit colleagues for their TechDays sessions: Rene, Marcel, Patriek and Marcel.
Thanks to everyone for attending my sessions, the great conversations and feedback! See you next year?
