- Posted by Jakob Andersen on February 12, 2010
The company that I work for Miracle has a reputation. A reputation for throwing some exiting and very social konferences. Usually the themes have been either Oracle or SQL Server but this year this has changed. The Oracle and SQL Server folks will have to get a long and furthermore we have added a Microsoft development track and a workshop track, so I bet the discussions over the drinks and dinner will be a little less onesided this year.
The venue is Lalandia/Legoland in Billund and everything is included in the conferencefee: food, drinks, accomedation and off course access to the galladinner and the legendary beachparty held in the venues waterpark (Don't miss this, its a blast).
I have been involved in the planning of the development and workshop tracks and i thought it would fit me to write a little bit about the speakers i have invited to talk at the event and why i look forward to a couple of exiting days in April:
Rasmus Kromann-Larsen will demonstrate his mad ninjaskills with ReSharper and im pretty sure that when you leave the talk you will have a few extra tricks up your sleeve to improve your productivity when writing and navigating around code. Rasmus second session will discuss some practical experiences from an ASP.NET MVC implementation project, so if you still miss to see how ASP.NET MVC will work in the wild compared to webforms you should definitely go.
Mads Kristensen from Vodafone is a really weird guy compared to most of the .NET developers i know. Mads look on performance has a strong focus on things like renderingtime in the browser and how much data we send to the clients. This aspect of performanceoptimization is often missed and if you have struggled to reduce the waittime in your serverside code I bet you that Mads will show you some tricks that can improve the response time from the users point of view.
Mark S. Rasmussen from iPaper knows a lot about working with existing PDF documents. Mark has had the technical responsibility from building the iPaper solution from scratch. He will show you how to work efficiently with large PDF documents and what information you can extract from them. Furthermore Mark secretly wan't to be sysadm so he loves monitoring performance of his systems, thats why his second talk will talk about end-to-end tracing of your applications across infrastructure points and including the database.
Have you ever heard of WinDBG? If you haven't you missed out on of the most valuable tools for debugging the really tough problems like deadlocks or memoryleaks in both managed and unmanaged code. Brian Rasmussen who works at SimCorp is an expert on WinDBG and a really good speaker. Brian will present a session about WinDBG and if you really want to get messy he will host a workshop where you can explore the wonders of WinDBG in more depth. On a personal note i can add that WinDBG has been one of the favorites in my toolbox since i first learned to use it.
Adding to the above speakers we have some very skilled Miracle employees that will present on the development track:
Anders Lybecker is going to talk about the full-text search framework Lucene.NET. Anders has reallife experience with Lucene.NET from several projects with large amounts of data and demands for fast searches with continious updating of the searchindex.
Simon Clemen Pedersen is going to take you on a guided tour in the jungle of javascript frameworks and show how you can keep a clean and maintainable codebase when working with the Dojo javascriptlibrary.
I am going to give a few talks aswell. First of i will introduce how we can measure an applications throughput to create a performancebasline for the application. This baseline can be used to find the knee in performancecourves aswell as monitoring performance across new releases. My second talk will discuss different caching strategies in applications. Lastly im going to give a talk on some of the more exotic features in nHiberante like Sharding, Validators and Caching.
Even though you might see yourselv as a developer type a lot of interesting topics is on the SQL Server and Oracle tracks aswell. Topics like: how to work with huge databases, SQL Server Integration Services,, how to write effective SQL, XML in the database. And of course a lot of topics on performance and scalability. One of my "odd" but must-see sessions is Toon Koppelaars "Applied Mathematics for database professionals", i have heard the talk once before and its about how to use basic mathematics to formally describe difficult SQL Queries, and hence use mathematical rules to simplify or optimize the queries, that session is highly recommended!
We are still working on completing the speakerlineup, so if you have any suggestions please let me know, and i will see if we can make it happen.
Registration and more information is available on: mow2010.dk
If you have any questions about the programme or the konference in general feel free to contact me on jta@miracleas.dk