Last week, we had the pleasure of attending TechDays 2014 in The Hague in the Netherlands. Present from DevExpress were Mark Miller, Mehul Harry, John F Martin, Don Wibier (our new Dutch hire for the Developer Relations team), myself, and, as a late entrant, my wife Donna who selflessly agreed to help out in the booth rather than go explore the city.
Talking of the booth, we went for an extremely high tech look with the whole of the backdrop backlit. It was stunning but made for some challenging photography, let me tell you.
Attendees were very interested in what we had to say and show, especially with Don there to talk Dutch. We had two Surface 2s in display cases, allowing people to play around with the demo apps and see (and experience) at first hand what a touch-centric UI looks like on WinForms, WPF, ASP.NET, and Windows 8.
We also had the large monitor for demos to groups of more than a few.
As marketing support we were showing off the UI Superhero character in many guises: T-shirts, mugs, bags, mouse pads, and even cushions…
Each day we gave out a raffle prize. Day 1 was a free subscription to DXperience, and day 2 a free seat at the next XAF training week in Bad Ems, Germany. Prior to the raffle we did a quick presentation of some feature of our products, with day 1 being Mehul on ASP.NET…
…and day 2 being Mark on CodeRush.
During the sessions, when all was quiet at the booth, some of us found time to be pensive…
…whereas Donna and John discussed how to organize the swag giveaways.
Both Mark and Mehul had sessions, with Mark reprising a much enhanced talk on The Science of Great UI. This turned out to be so popular that the room filled up and the audience overflowed into the corridor.
We would like to thank all of the attendees who came to the booth. Considering we didn’t know any Dutch whatsoever (apart from Don), we were thankful that so many people understood and could talk to us in English. We were humbled to say the least.