I had a chance to attend DevDays in Cleveland last week and wanted to post a review of the content presented there. This review is just of the content, the speakers and logistics in Cleveland were all great. I decided take the "Smart Client" track, so I can only comment on those sessions.
The first session gave an introduction to the IssueVision sample smart client that was built for DevDays. It is a nice and simple issue tracking program that actually looks pretty nice. Then, to my surprise, they started talking about patterns and how they were used in this application. They showed both the theory and the implementation of the observer and command pattern. I heard someone who had never been exposed to patterns sit up and say "Hey that is pretty cool, why don't we do that?". I was very impressed to see them covering patterns at one of these events.
The second session was for the most part completely worthless, good thing our speaker was funny. Instead of showing a real way to solve the issue of data concurrency they copped out and showed auto generated stuff from the data adapter that most people would never use. (Yeah, I don't think complete access to tables is a good idea)
The third session was pretty good, but really did not have much to do with smart clients. They showed a good example of how to use one-way salted hashing to protect passwords... but that applies to every application. There was also some client side encryption stuff, which does apply to smart clients, but could also apply to other applications. This session should have just been called "Developing Secure Applications"
The fourth session content was decent, but also really applied to any type of application. There was alot of time spent on executing a program from the web, which is actually pretty impractical due to security issues. At least they ended up covering the application updater block which is useful.
I thought it was kind of strange that every example was in VB.NET, but during one the samples I finally understood why Cory Smith named his site AddressOf. (At first I thought they were referencing his site or something)
Closing and opening keynotes were both pretty good. The InfoPath stuff is a little dated, considering it was Office 2003 after all. The longhorn video was pretty cool, but I think it was a little too much for some people to swallow.
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