Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Attended the AUBG Microsoft Day

The AUBG Microsoft Day is an initiative by Microsoft Bulgaria, which is organized every year for the students of the American University in Bulgaria. This time, instead of the usual emphasis on purely Computer Science topics, two seminars were given particularly for Business Administration students. The seminars dealt primarily with the implementations of CRM and ERP software in the business process, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Dynamcs NAV were shown as examples. A Microsoft Bulgaria initiative was announced that would allow AUBG students (at least, those that are particularly interested in Business) to have an access to licensed versions of Dynamics NAV and CRM, and (probably) obtain a copy for academic purposes.

I expected to see some implementations of Microsoft's on-demand business tools, but alas, they are still sold exclusively in the States.

Luckily, I managed to win a Silverlight 2.0 book at the seminar. I stil haven't got a chance to take a look at it, though.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Attended DevReach 2008

Last night, I came back from Sofia where I had spent the day participating in one of the largest developer conferences on the Balkans - DevReach 2008. Unfortunately, university issues made me stay only a few hours, and the leave for Blagoevgrad again. The sessions I attended were good, though. I got introduced to the functionality of the Windows Workflow Foundation (or WF). At the beginning, the idea seemed to me quite inapplicable to the daily routines of anything but a large company, yet an idea just popped into my mind that might prove this wrong.

The Workflow concept is intended to allow people with business logic and developers to collaborate in a way that each one does what he/she is best at. The process analyst constructs a business process using a diagramatic tool included in Visual Studio 2008. Despite presented visually in front of the eyes of the analyst, every diagram is actually XAML code. Every step in the process presents a hook where XAML code binds with the core C# or VB code written by the developer.

Anyaway, the most interesting lecture I attended was preseneted by Lino Tadros, CEO of Falafel Software, Inc. He talked about many of the misconceptions about using AJAX in ASP.NET applications, and how if improperly done, an application using AJAX might actually run slower than one that uses pure ASP.NET. Mr. Tadros showed many examples of proper uses of AJAX and numerous times emphasized on the phrase "proper optimization". A truly amazing lecture.