Saturday 22 November 2014

Microsoft Future Decoded 2014

On a pretty miserable Wednesday, I set off for the Excel centre in London to attend the Microsoft Future Decoded conference. My aim of the day was to learn what Microsoft was planning for the future in terms of the .NET framework and to hopefully generate a few ideas that I can utilize in future projects.

The event consists of three separate sections, in the morning you had the key note speeches. In the afternoon you had various technical tracks on a range of subjects and throughout the day you had the expo.

The keynote speeches were, as a whole, very interesting. They covered quite a wide range of topics from open data, that's data that is publicly available in a machine readable format, to the technology advancements in the formula one world. The speakers themselves were all very good public speakers and the final speaker was Professor Brian Cox, he's obviously on TV a lot which should give you an idea of the calibre of speaker at the event. The problem with all of this is that very little of the content of the talks actually related to the development world and I was left wondering what exactly I, as a developer, was meant to take out of the talks. Don't get me wrong, it was very interesting learning about the theories behind how the universe began but I didn't see how that was going to help me in the near future.

As for the technical tracks, there were a variety of topics to go and listen to, ranging from "Big Data" to the "Future of the .NET Framework". The structure of these tracks was that there was three separate presentations, each one separated by a quick coffee break. Now I have an interest in various areas and it would have been good if I could have sat in on one talk from one track, then another talk in another track... kind of mix and matching topics throughout the day. The problem was that each of the talks in each track lasted a different amount of time so without turning up to a talk late, there was no way you could do such a thing.

With that in mind, I ended up going to the "Future of .NET Framework" track. It seemed a reasonable thing to do considering that will affect pretty much every project I work on in the foreseeable future. It seemed the vast majority of attendees thought the same. The session was massively over subscribed with a good portion of people having to sit on the floor or stand at the back. To make matters worse, I didn't get much out of it if I'm honest. I follow the inner workings of the .NET framework in quite a bit of detail, making sure that I'm at the cutting edge of the technology and trying to see if there's any technology that I can take advantage of on the horizon. Sadly the vast majority of things being shown I had already read and researched from various other announcements. The one big announcement of the day was that the .NET framework was being made completely open source. Don't get me wrong, this is a massive step and one in the right direction but I didn't gain any value from being there in person for this announcement, I'd have taken just as much out of it by reading about it the following day. None of the talks inspired me or generated any new ideas which I felt was pretty disappointing.

Finally, there was the exhibition. I was hoping this would be the saving grace for the day but alas, it wasn't to be. The vast majority of the exhibition was people just trying to sell services, services that were completely irrelevant to me, a developer. The only real good thing about the exhibition... the x-box stand fully loaded with Fifa. Who couldn't resist a go on that?

Overall then, I left the conference quite underwhelmed. The future definitely didn't seem decoded to me. With that said, would I go next year? I certainly would. The keynotes, although had little relevance to my day job were interesting. As for the technical tracks, I feel the key to getting the most out of those may be to pick a subject that I don't follow in such detail, big data perhaps. Doing that I suspect I'd leave the track with more knowledge then when I went in which will help me feel like it was more of a success. And as for the expo... more time on Fifa would certainly be required!