Another successfull ITPro|DevConnections event

It’s been almost a month since this year’s ITPro|DevConnections and it’s been at least a couple of weeks since this post has been sitting in my drafts folder waiting to be published. A lot of things have changed this summer (but this is the topic of another post) and things have been pretty hectic so I haven’t been able to keep up with my blogging. And haven’t been able to tell you all about this years’ ITPro|DevConnections.

For those of you that are still not aware of what ITPro|DevConnections is, every year around November the IT professionals community, www.autoexec.gr, in cooperation with the developers’ community, www.dotnetzone.gr, present a two days event with lots of parallel tracks! The event has been running for four years now, each year with more success. During these two days we get to speak a lot about all the cutting edge Microsoft technologies meet and discuss with fellow professionals and generally have a great time.  If you speak Greek then you can also hear how the event was captured by one of the largest TV networks in Greece (ANT1)

To organize for these two days we spend the whole year around planning and preparing for it. As well as try to find the necessary funds, as nothing is free, to minimize the risk of having to put money from our pocket. It comes without saying that it requires a lot of energy and it can get really stressful at times but it gets very rewarding at the end.

This year, around 600 IT professionals and developers attended the event, making it the largest community organized event in Greece. Although we faced a number of issues during the event, I believe that everyone was satisfied at the end with the quality of the content offered. Surely we’re learning from our mistakes and we’ll make ITPro|DevConnections even better next year.

My Session this year was about searching in the cloud. Boost your searching with Windows Azure.

Talking with a lot of customers I’ve discovered that one of the major pain points when developing or migrating their applications to Windows Azure is searching. A large majority currently used SQL Server Full Text Search for searching text in their database. Unfortunately SQL Server Full Text Search is not currently supported in Windows Azure. So in my session we explored our searching options and discussed the benefits and drawbacks of each solution.

You can find my slide deck here…

I’m looking forward for next years event.