Snowball - The Blog

Today, the Belgian edition of Mix, ReMix09, took place in Belgium. With an almost sold out conference, the expectations were high, many people were expecting to learn new things on the tools and technologies that will influence how we work in the coming years. Silverlight, Expression Blend & Design, Surface… were covered in today’s sessions. Some corporate speakers, including Brad Abrams (who joined Visug yesterday for another sold out event) and Adam Kinney.

The event

After a long absence from Kinepolis in Brussels, the troops again gathered in the largest cinema complex in Belgium. Like said in the introduction, the event was almost completely sold out, which was noticeable in the keynote: almost all chairs were taken and at that very point, the highway around Brussels was still completely stuck.

Because of the fact that it’s a cinema complex, the rooms themselves are the best to do presentations in and also to watch them in.

All attendees could get a trial version of Blend, which I noticed were very much wanted.

The speakers

Most of the content today was brought by corporate speakers, giving attendees a deep insight in the technologies that were covered. These included Silverlight, Surface, Blend and ASP.NET MVC. What struck me somehow, is that there where more questions after sessions than normal: Belgian audience is not very communicative, however today, quite some questions were asked.

The keynote was delivered by Katrien De Graeve and Luc Van De Velde. It was clear, to the point and had a nice flow of ideas in it. Good work, guys!

The technologies

Two things really amazed me today. First, when Luc asked during the keynote, how many people attended last year’s Mix Essentials, only an estimated 5-10% raised their hand. I can’t think of an explanation for this though…

The other thing is the following: the people that attended the conference, had very little knowledge of the Silverlight and Blend tools. OK, you can think: that’s why they came to the conference, right?! True, but still, I would have expected that more people would have experimented with the Silverlight tools.

The pictures

I took my camera with me today (for once I actually didn’t forget to do so…) and here are some of the pictures. The full album can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gillcleeren/sets/72157622483133184/

View Full Album

Ordina@ReMix

A nice video testimonial for Ordina was shown in the keynote where I talk about WPF projects we have done in the past few months. The video will be added soon here!