Yes, it's already done: after three amazing days, the Techdays have come to their end. It's thus time to recapitulate and conclude on what we got to see.

Developer sessions

My best surprise has certainly been the meta-programming session: not only T4 isn't a language in itself and can be used very easily (even more than the ASP.NET Razor generator I have been using recently for some of my projects) but Roselyn seems to have made some pretty good progress, coming to a point where it seems almost usable in production. I also got to see how powerful project addins built using Nuget were, and how Powershell can finally be useful to me, the dev guy.

Another very interesting session has been the NFC one, where I learnt a lot about the technology in itself and the current state of interoperability in the field. Given my new Asus VivoTab RT has an NFC built-in, I'm sure I'm going to play with this very soon.

I also discovered the power of SignalR and the ease of use of the ASP.NET Web API, as well as some tricky differences that exist between C# and VB.NET.

Last but not least, I was given a course on the details of the WinJS framework I had been guessing but didn't really investigate more in depth by lack of time. Knowing the internals of your JS framework is really important to make the most of it. In particular, delayed element data binding and bound element recycling have been pretty interesting to discover (they show where the native web API need more progress).

IT and Cloud sessions

While those aren't the things I prefer in the computer world, I must admit the few IT & Cloud sessions I saw were pretty good and helped me reconciliate with the few IT guys I know ;-) Clearly, Microsoft does a job in the IT world which is as amazing as the one does in the dev world, and that's pleasing to see.

Geek sessions

The Techdays are not only a dev event, they are also a geek event: it's important, a few times in a year, to get to see people which are even more geek than you, and that's exactly what I got to see in the 'Coding for fun' and 'The Geek is in the house' session.

Newtorking

I also got to discuss with some French students and a few professionals and I enjoyed sharing my views with them, and getting their own advices on new technologies and products.

Conclusion

Alll in all, the Techdays have been a pretty interesting event to attend, and Microsoft France can certainly expect to see me again next year ;-)