Even though it is a little bit early to already look back at 2007, I can safely do so for the conference season, because for me it ended last week with Mobile Connections in Las Vegas. In this column I like to quickly revisit all those conferences where I had presentations scheduled. Interestingly enough, there used to be a time when I just attended conferences. Thinking back about last year, I did not attend one single conference just to extend my own knowledge. In other words, I have been speaking at all conferences I attended. Things started very disappointing, not being able to speak at Embedded World 2007 in Nuremberg. I don’t want to repeat the reasons why I was not present at EW 2007, however, if you have been reading my columns you probably know why or at least you can find the reason somewhere. In May things started to take off though. MEDC 2007 in Las Vegas was a great conference in my opinion. I think we had more attendees than previous years, maybe because the conference was combined with a new Microsoft Conference around Web Technologies, called Mix. During MEDC 2007 I only had one presentation, about asynchronous programming techniques. At least the room was packed with around 200 attendees joining me. I remember asking attendees to fill out their eval form and at least mention that we need a full day (pre or post conference) to talk exclusively about multi-threading and asynchronous programming. Hopefully we will get the opportunity next year. After MEDC 2007 preparations began for TechEd 2007, which was held in Orlando. I had the honor to speak about the new diagnostic tools that will ship with Visual Studio 2008, also covering Remote Performance Monitor, already available with the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 SP1. In June, MEDC Europe was a very busy event for me, having 3 talks and 2 instructor led labs. All the sessions were repeat sessions from MEDC USA, so I had no worries about slide decks or lab manuals, but still, every talk and instructor led lab takes preparation time.

After the summer break, things started moving again with a very nice Dutch conference. The Software Developer Conference 2007, where I had two different sessions about Windows Mobile Development. This year’s conference season ended with lots of traveling, first visiting Redmond for two weeks for some slightly related, yet entirely different meetings, then moving on to Las Vegas, with an interesting flight schedule, flying from Seattle to Las Vegas with connecting flights in Minneapolis, Amsterdam, Paris, Los Angeles and of course Las Vegas (all within 40 hours). Apparently my luggage could not keep up with this complex travel schedule, so I arrived in Las Vegas last week with no luggage. Mobile Connections was the last conference for me this season, and it was a great conference. We had more people attending the mobile track than last year. This year I presented 4 sessions at Mobile Connections, with varying topics like COM interoperability, Unit Testing for Devices, Asynchronous programming on Windows Mobile Devices and State & Notification Broker demystified.

All in all I had 13 official speaking opportunities at conferences in 2007; A personal record so far. Since all speaking slots were 75 minutes, this resulted in over 16 hours of talking in front of an audience about Windows Mobile and Windows Embedded CE. I won’t count webcasts in this little conference summary, maybe I will speak about those at the end of this year, giving you another summary.

Right now it is time to start thinking about the 2008 conference season. With Visual Studio 2008, the brand new version 3.5 of the .NET Compact Framework, new devices coming to market, new diagnostic tools becoming available and so on, there is so much to talk about. Hopefully I will get the chance to share my development experience with you again at several conferences. It is not only fun to talk about this cool technology, but it is even better to have the chance to meet many developers in person during conferences.

Maarten Struys