Houston TechFest 2007 Rocks!

I've been a "regular" of the Houston Dot Net User Group (hdnug.org) for some time. I've been attending some of their publicly available meetings at the Microsoft Houston Meeting Facility. In 2007, they've announced to hosting their first annual Houston Technology Festival (TechFest), which is a free event for IT professionals AND developers interested in learning about current and future technology. The nice thing about it is that it is also done in association with the Houston Java Users Group (hjug.org).

The event happened on August 25th, 2007, at the University of Houston. The key note was given by a well-known speaker, Brad Abrams from Microsoft. He talked about this new technology that is Silverlight to create Rich Interactive Applications (RIAs). At first glance, Silverlight seems to me like another variation of Flash but way into the presentation you can clearly see the differences between the 2 technologies. Here's a blog post discussing about this exact topic: Silverlight vs. Flash: The Developer Story.

Check out the awesome Silverlight brand video below.

Next, I attended the morning's presentation of Chris Koening about Building Exciting, Standards-based User Experiences with Expression Studio. Again I'm going to make another comparison with applications that already exist because this is my first time hearing about Expression. MS Expression Studio seems to me like another version of Adobe Creative Suite. The MS professional suite includes 4 tools for designers to bring their vision to reality and boost developer collaboration in the delivery of rich user experiences for the Web, and beyond. They are: Expression Web/Blend/Design/Media.

Silverlight is integrated with Expression as well as Visual Studio .NET. Chris' presentation showed how easy it was to get started using Expression Blend and Design in less than 20 minutes. What stood out the most to me was that Silverlight is written in XAML (pronounced "zammel"). XAML is an Extensible Application Markup Language that can be used to define the UI for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications and is therefore separate from the runtime-logic. This is very powerful in a sense that it's interopable.

I've also attended Mike Saleme's session about Developing with .NET and Oracle Technology. This presentation was primarily geared towards Oracle Developer Tools for MS Visual Studio .NET, which can be downloaded here.

Besides the presentations, many of the event sponsors were also available outside of the conference rooms. Most of them were recruiting companies like Sogeti, Volt, and Comsys to just name a few. Hence, it was also a great chance for networking especially for those on the lookout for jobs.

Overall, I thought this year's Houston TechFest was a great success in terms of organization and branding. I hope this will be available to Houstonians for years to come.