Wednesday, November 12, 2008

VFP, SQL & .NET DevCon in Frankfurt am Main, Germany

DevConIt is again the time of the year, when the German Visual FoxPro, SQL and .NET developer conference takes place in Lindner Congress Hotel, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Just as every year, the organizers prepared three rich conference days, filled up with sessions about Visual FoxPro, SQL-Server and .NET technologies. Right now, counting directly from the conference schedule, I see a total of 63 sessions, including the keynotes and vendor sessions. The majority of these are presented in German, but there is always at least one or two English ones running in parallel. Each and every session also has its session notes available in a sizeable conference binder and on a conference CD. For those, who like to stay awake a bit longer and get even more information after dinner, there are the late night sessions available. These many times tend to continue long outside of the session rooms, in a wonderful mood, right in the bar with a fine glass of beer.

Compared to the last year, the attendee count seems to have dropped a bit. This, however, in no way impacts the size or the quality of the conference. There are many new speakers present as well as the usual and proven ones returning. For the first time at the German DevCon we can hear Bo Durban, Tamar Granor and Steffen Pirsig speaking. After a short pause, we also have Ken Levy, who will share some thoughts on converting VFP projects to .NET and Kevin McNeish, who will be speaking about .NET in general.

Together with a colleague of mine I am actively taking part in the event as the on-line coverage reporter for the Universal Thread developer community website. If you’d like to follow the event more closely, either just in picture or in text, have a look at the official conference coverage websites at http://www.utcoverage.com/German/2008 for the VFP part of the conference and http://www.utcoverage.com/German/20082/ for the SQL and .NET part.