NDC 2010 Wrap Up

I was in Oslo, Norway the week of June 14th for the Norwegian Developer’s Conference.

One of the recurring side conversations I had at this conference centered around the contrast between a vendor led conference and an independent conference (like the NDC). If you’ve only been to vendor conferences then you owe it to yourself to experience the amazing depth and breadth of the entire .NET world. Sure, the NDC had sessions on the latest bits from Window Azure and Windows Mobile, but the following topics did not fall into the minority:

• Life beyond the IDE (team building, leadership, and productivity)
• Methodologies (agile, XP, scrum, and lean)
• Fundamentals (TDD, design principles, and writing clean code)
• Other frameworks (like Mono, OpenRasta, FubuMVC, and IronRuby on Rails)

The essence of a developer conference forms when the organizers sit down and frame the guiding question for their mission. Is the question going to be:

What does a developer need to be a well-rounded and skilled professional?

Or is it:

What should we tell attendees about our products?

In any case, videos from NDC are coming online at streaming.ndc2010.no - check it out for yourself.

Vigeland Park

If you are visiting Oslo I can highly recommend a walk through the Vigeland Sculpture Park (if the weather isn’t overbearing). Here is a picture I took near the Wheel of Life looking ESE towards the Monolith.