DevIntersection 2016 – Recap

May 9, 2016

Because I work for such an abusive, grueling company like Rockton Software I was forced to endure a week in Orlando, Florida to attend this year’s DevIntersection Conference.

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Billed as the intersection of tools and technologies, this conference had plenty of valuable content to help enhance your skill setThere were sessions covering Visual Studio, ASP.NET, Azure, SQL, SharePoint and Office365 presented by some of the best and brightest Subject Matter Experts in the industry.

This conference was smaller in scale than some of the other conferences like Build or Ignite, but this was a welcome change and allowed for:

  • Easier navigation between sessions (I only encountered one session that had a room booked that could not hold the attendees which was a frequent occurrence at Build last year.)
  • More time to interact with the presenters
  • Much better meals than your typical conference

My best guess would say attendance was probably in the 1000-1500 people range with around 12 companies having sponsorship booths.

There were workshops available both Pre and Post Conference and this is where I got my first exposure to the Internet of Things (IOT)!

Led by Doug Seven, we were given a Raspberry Pi and a GrovePi+ Starter Kit that had Windows 10 installed on a micro-sd card.

We then completed various lab exercises ranging from the simplest: Blink an LED (think Hello World), all the way up to complex: sending messages from our Pi device up to the cloud.

That last exercise was a real eye opener into the efforts Microsoft is making in adding IOT capability to the Azure cloud offering.

It was neat to write code that would read values from a Light Sensor on the Raspberry Pi and send messages in real time to the Azure Event Hub using Stream Analytics.


Once I was done with the Pre-Conference Workshop it was on to the Conference.

Here is a list of my favorite sessions (with links to content):

Long story short, if your company forces you to go spend a week in Orlando, Florida and learn about exciting new  technologies then the DevIntersection Conference is well worth your time!

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