DFUG : AIR User Group Meeting in Aarhus

Last Thursday I had the great opportunity to attend a couple of hours of free-stepping by the two AIR evangelists, Mike Chambers and Lee Brimelow (both from Adobe).

Making Aarhus one of their 6 European stops on the AIR User Group tour of Europe it was a great opportunity for me as a true Copenhaniac to revisit the wonderful capital of Jutland (The danish mainland)(Copenhagen is our nation's true capital featuring our Parliament as well as the notoriously expensive amusement park Tivoli and the (for most tourists surprisingly small) Little Mermaid).

Anyways...

The setting was LynFabrikken, a media collective featuring just about everything the nearly human developers heart may desire. I had brought my GF for the trip so we started getting some sushi at a nearby SushiBar and bringing it to the venue. Everybody else was drinking beer and eating pizza so we kinda didn't fit into any of the arch-types present, but neither did the fact that she was a female so I suppose we were the odd couple of the crowd (I counted 3 female specimens out of the apr. 120 attendees).

Mike Chambers started presenting General Adobe... I shall not elaborate on this, you will know already for sure.

Lee Brimelow continued after the break where most people used the opportunity to refresh themselves from the DFUG-sponsored bar and to catch up among their network. Nice ambiance altogether.
Going through the general description of AIR, Lee entertained everybody with his informal and self-deprecating style for which he is known.
Seeing that he actually used to evangelize for WPF instead of Adobe's Flash Platform I couldn't keep my question bottled up about where he saw the eventual standoff between Flash and WPF taking place and on what grounds.
He refused such a thing would happen due to the completely different characteristics of the two platforms.
He used the opportunity to make sure that everyone was aware of the fact that Silverlight and Microsoft is great for creating applications, but they sucked at creating experiences. So if you want to create a boring CRUD oriented data-management application in a controlled environment its fine to use WPF, but if you want to create an experience or even just to wrap tedious work processes for users in a compelling UI, the the Flash Platform would be your obvious choice... Not mentioning that its SO unlikely that Silverlight will ever get the same penetration as the Flash player but leaving this unsaid and yet there was none among the audience that wasn't aware of this fact. Unfortunately he managed (once again) to avoid answering and explaining concretely his drastic change from evangelizing one thing to evangelizing the opposition... some day I hope to get him to explain in details this transition of epic proportions.

Shortly after the conclusion the American guys left to catch the train to Cologne (The location for the meeting next day) and I ended up having a very interesting talk with Andreas Hollström from Adobe Nordic about the interdepartmental processes on Flex development projects, a dialog that took its offset in the Thermo review and soon moved into general process optimization... interesting stuff :-)

The GF and I soon had to split to catch our train back to Copenhagen, so we had to leave the free bar unravished, but I promised to come back soon and take care of that.
I had to limit myself to one beer during my chat with Andreas as I had to launch an early public Beta of our newly developed project for Elsparefonden: "Min Bolig | Det intelligente hjem".

The deployment went fine as did the train ride. My GF not coming from Denmark and not being technically inclined, actually enjoyed the trip and I am considering to bring her to more of this sort of thing as it always lights up the room with a beautiful girl, and it almost NEVER seems to bother geeks and other nice folks to be in the presence of a good looking female (but then again, who would dislike that).