Nice event, and free to attend, too (thanks to all the Platinum and Gold and Silver and other sponsors).

Joel Spolsky: How to write popular software

He would have surely signed my copy of his book, too, but I misplaced it.

Mr. Kurihara: Aren't we forgetting the data

About the importance of proper data modelling, data storage, access path design, validation and other data-centric topics, and how they are often just an afterthought to application development, which leads to all kinds of nasty problems. I always feel at home with these kind of talks, reminds me of my university days and makes me want to move into the data management space, away from application development with its ill-defined and ever-changing requirements.

Lunch break

The Japanese Squeak user group had an OLPC (not the XO-1, but an almost identical developer pre-release machine with a Spanish keyboard) and we could try out the mesh network functionality, chatting and sharing a text editing session. Great fun.

The latest on rich clients

A panel discussion with representatives from Adobe (Flash/Flex/AIR), Microsoft (.NET/Silverlight) and Curl (Curl).

Jeffrey Fredrick (Agitar Software): Continuous Integration

An introduction to Continuous Integration and how it can benefit the development process by increasing product quality and shortening development cycles.

Next generation web application frameworks

By next generation, he meant frameworks that try to completely hide the stateless nature of HTTP requests with sessions and continuations. JBoss Seam and Wicket were presented as examples. There was also a lively discussion about how robust and complete these new approaches already are.

Mr. Ikehara (Infragistics) Line-of-Business development WPF

An introduction to Vista's new Windows Presentation Foundation and how it can be used to create attractive applications for a company's vital back-office operations, including a rather impressive live coding session showcasing Infragistics WPF components.

Programming Languages of the Past, Present and Future

A discussion between Yukihiro Matsumoto (creator of Ruby) and Daigo Hamura (test leader for C#) about language design, development process, life cycles, backwards compatibility, and other issues the maintainers of programming languages face.