This week was my first week back on the office after a 2 week tour in India. I was a speaker on a three city tour for the SD Best Practices conferences that were held in India by Dr. Dobbs magazine. This was my first opportunity to meet the editor in chief of Dr. Dobbs, Jonathan Erickson, so it was a pleasure just to have that opportunity. He has authored 10 books, from SQL Server to Herb Gardening! The talk I decided to do for the tour was "An Agile Approach to Building a Better User Experience". It went over really well, there was a good amount of discussion at the booth after the talk about the arguments I made for a more agile way of building out the presentation layer and the techniques to make an iterative design successful. I can't take entire credit for the concepts in the talk, Andrew Flick, the PM of our Windows Forms and WPF products, has done this talk at the Patterns & Practices Summits held around the world (I think he was last spotted in Norway somewhere, or maybe it was Sweden). I took a little content from one of the UI talks I did in Europe last year and mashed it up with Flick's talk and came out with a pretty good presentation on agile, UI patterns, and an overall explanation of a user centric model for presentation layer design.
Besides the speaking events in Hyderbad, Chennai and Bangalore, I also visited a handful of other cities and spent time with existing and new customers with Bob Wolf, our VP of Sales, and the folks from the Infragistics India operation. This was my 2nd trip to India, and I really enjoy the opportunity to get to India and learn about the culture and the people. If you haven't been to India, you need to add it to your list of places to visit. It is an amazing place, very different than where I grew up (Detroit, MI, USA), but also very similar in a lot of ways. The people are more than great, everyone is so friendly, the food is amazing, and of course the there are a ton of developers and architects who love to talk about .NET, Java and the arguments that go with! The best part of my job (besides working with some of the best people in the world at Infragistics) is talking to customers and developers from every continent, understanding what they are looking for in the presentation layer, and how we can help.
Amazingly enough, I can be in London, New Delhi, Los Angeles, Bangalore, Frankfurt, Paris, New York City, Toronto, Mobile Alabama or Amsterdam - it doesn't matter where - it is almost impossible to tell the difference of where I am at when I am talking with a room full of people who are passionate about programming, architecture and of course the presentation layer. The ideas are always great, everyone is always really smart and there are of course always a lot of opinions!
Next week, I am in Florida and the South Florida Code Camp, and I will be visting customers in Tampa and Jacksonville. I'll report back any worthy news!