Telerik Supports New Zealand ALM Conference

New Zealand's first Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) conference ran in Wellington on 6 and 7 April 2011. This is the premier event for developers and project managers in New Zealand. Telerik is proud to be one of the sponsors.

Figure: As usual, Telerik and Visual Studio 2010 sit well together

The two-day conference programme was packed with high quality international and local speakers presenting on ALM and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

There were a lot of interesting sessions and here are the ones that I like the most:

• Database development with the new version of SQL Server – Denali, presented by Peter Ward, SQL Server MVP. Some of the great features of Denali include AlwaysOn or HADR, the new development environment – Juneau, contained databases, Apollo – the new columnar index and many more.
• Economics of the cloud computing presented by Chris Auld, Windows Azure MVP and CTO at Intergen. It is good to know that “cloud computing isn't a technological innovation as much as a business one” and “the cloud's unique selling proposition is elasticity”
• Going beyond the MVVM by Chris Klug
• Utilizing Virtualization to enhance your ALM capabilities by Brian Randell, Visual Studio ALM MVP. He discussed the Microsoft virtualization stack and how it can be used in your development shops. Brian covered features of Hyper-V for use in on your servers, in your development team’s lab, and even production. He has also addressed how virtualization can be used for disaster recovery and high availability.
  On the same subject – see the black screen on the Sydney Airport which we captured just the day before the conference:

Figure: Sydney Airport servers boot failure proves again how important is virtualization and testing

• Continuous Delivery by Stephen GodBold, Visual Studio ALM MVP. I did not know that Flickr are deploying so continuously: “In the last week there were 61 deploys of 551 changes by 20 people”. We had Stephen speak at the monthly Sydney .NET User Group meeting last night. It was great and Telerik “continuously delivered” the sushi. 
• Rapid SharePoint Development for Teams using Visual Studio 2010 by Adam Cogan, Microsoft Regional Director and Chief Architect at SSW. He showed some powerful tools for project managers (TFS Dashboard, customizing reports with Excel Web Services), developers (SharePoint Power Tools, Gated Check-ins, Intellitrace) and testers (Web Performance Tests, CodedUI tests and Automated tests with Telerik Test Studio). Attendees loved to see the advantages of the automated over the manual tests and how easy it is to test any SharePoint site with the Telerik Test Studio. 
•  “The Great IT Debate” of the conference was on the hot topic “HTML5 will kill Silverlight”. Two teams of two were arguing passionately, each with good arguments, but I won’t tell you the winner of the debate. The winners were five people who won a free copy of the Telerik agile project management tool – TeamPulse during the debate. 

The slides from most of the sessions are now available for download.

The organization, sessions, speakers and the people I met were great and I hope to see you there next year again.