Hi All, This week I'm in Auckland, New Zealand speaking at, and attending Microsoft Ignite.

I thought I'd write a quick post to talk about my first time in this historic MS event. This is the 21st(!!!) event of it's kind in NZ (formerly TechEd) and my gosh it's a polished, slick event now.

I walked into a massive room surrounded by screens and orange.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The keynote was a series of speakers all talking about various cool technologies Microsoft has. It doesn't take sherlock Holmes to realise that I'm more of an Apple guy, but anybody in their right mind should be able to recognize cool tech when they see it. There were demos of Chat bots, meeting room/whiteboard devices, machine learning and more!

Some of you might not know, but for 2 years, I was actually a part time, during study and summers, C#/.Net dev a few years ago... so a lot the tooling is quite familiar to me (and I actually like). Stay tuned for a rant about tooling in a future post.

The rest of the talks seemed super polished and I got to do my talk yesterday afternoon too. It was titled the Future of Apps and described the transition from Apps to Services with many devices being able to offer interactions with users for a given service. More on that in a future post.

I also got to try out the HoloLens... and that was seriously impressive. I did a couple of Computer Vision and Mixed Reality courses at University so it's really cool to see it in practice and so polished - it's definitely not an easy task. I'll talk more about that in a future post too*.

Anyway, Ignite is pretty darn cool. It's definitely a different crowd to what I'm used to (fewer hipsters and a bit more enterprise vendors) but once you get through that, the code and demos during the talks is awesome and I'm quite enjoying my self so far.

If you're also at the conference, feel free to come say hi - I'm @samjarman - just tweet me and we'll arrange something.

Take care,

Sam

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*Boy, I've promised so many posts. Joy...

Update: Posts are now viewable at SamJarman.co.nz/Blog