A week ago the first OpenForce (the main DNN conference series) ended. Two days of presentations surrounded by lots of downtime with DNN colleagues. As a speaker I got the best of it this year. Paid hotel accommodations, paid food, paid drinks. What more could you want? Plus you get the wonderful Holland tour the day after the conference. This is where the conference speakers are shown a piece of folkloric Holland to remember their trip by. Here is a quick ‘n dirty report from those days.
DNN Europe event
First things first though. It all started out with a pre-conference get together of DNN-Europe in the weekend preceding the conference (i.e. the 17th and 18th of October). Around 30 DNN pros from across Europe (Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, England, Switzerland, Norway and Malta) convened in a business center in Arnhem (the same city that hosts the OpenForce conference) to discuss issues that … well that we feel need to be discussed. The whole event is actually a good excuse to travel and see each other with plenty of food and drink. The Saturday evening we went out for a wine-tasting session in the center of town. To my dismay the host did not have any Swiss wines. In his defense, these are very hard to get hold of outside Switzerland. The one thing I find hard about wine tasting is that you have to take it easy with the wine. As otherwise you’re too sloshed to enjoy the last (and probably best) wines.
Sunday morning some of the OpenForce attendees showed up at our event. This served multiple purposes. On the one hand we wanted to give the attendees the opportunity to query the top guys behind the platform, and secondly we wanted to show DNN Corp what kind of people make up this DNN-Europe network. Although this part of the event was rather short, it served its purpose IMO. The afternoon we were back in the center of town for a game (?!?!). Yes, we played cops and robbers as little kids. With one difference though. We had mobile devices to keep track of each other and to ‘shoot’ or ‘commit crimes’. This made it wholly acceptable for us geeks. Memorable about this day was that the first group of robbers was led by Benjamin Hermann (ITM consulting and fellow DNN CT member), who I believe runs marathons for fun. Needless to say we were outrun through the streets of Arnhem. His avatar just jumped from one end to the other end of the city. The evening we replenished with good old fashioned Dutch pancakes. Never had one of those? OK, add to “stuff to do before I die”. I even got the first timers that evening to try the bacon and apple pancake with syrup. Yummy. Kudos to Peter Schotman for putting together this event.
Some random pictures
OpenForce EU
OpenForce Europe took place on the 19th and 20th October this year at Papendal conference center, Arnhem. The event was well attended but one has to note that this is a much smaller event than the Las Vegas DevConnections OpenForce NA (North America). The EU event (which is partnered with the SDC in The Netherlands) is quite an intimate conference where the contact between attendees and speakers is actively encouraged and facilitated through its accommodations. The Papendal conference center is the National Olympic headquarters of The Netherlands and located in the forests outside Arnhem. The surroundings are beautiful and so are the accommodations. As usual my only regret is that I couldn’t enjoy this more as I spent all my time either at the conference or the bar in the evening chatting with my friends. Those friends I only get to see in person once or twice a year, but that I collaborate with on a regular basis in the DotNetNuke Core Team.
I found the sessions I attended to be very insightful and wished I could have split myself into multiple copies to be able to attend more sessions. You end up crossing your colleagues in the corridor and excusing yourself for not having shown up at their gig. Oh well, that’s the way it goes. Speakers this year included Shaun Walker, Nik Kalyani, Vicenç Masanas, Cathal Connely, Charles Nurse, Steve Fabian, Erik van Ballegoij, Stefan Kamphuis and myself (“Advanced Module Development” and “Software Protection for DNN Extensions”). If you’re in Europe and you haven’t been to this event yet, I can advise you to attend one day. All DNN sessions are in English and most other ones, too.
And then the ‘Holland Tour’ for the speakers. It was funny to be shown around Amsterdam as a tourist. I actually lived there for a year or so and in fact our tour group passed the very house I used to live in. A special moment for me that day. But other than the beauty of this city we had yet more time together to chat. I remember I was pretty drained when I finally hit the sack that Wednesday evening. And thinking to myself: thank God I have a couple of weeks to recharge before the OpenForce event in Las Vegas.
More Pictures