NAVTechDays 2016: Final thoughts

It’s been a while since NAV TechDays. And for a while I was thinking to skip the blogpost on how the latest NAV TechDays has been.. . But then again – the convention is without doubt the best one around for NAV developers, while it’s still “just” a private initiative from Luc – so it deserves all the attention it can get. :-).

Every year I write to you how perfect NAVTechDays has been .. . Well, this year, no difference! Basically, Luc did it again and put together a fantastic conference !

For years (6th edition last year) NAV TechDays is THE must-go-to conference for Microsoft Dynamics NAV developers. And it appears that most of us (except for the French developers – there was only 1 attendee from France (??) …) realize that. This year, Luc managed to get 1044 attendees to Antwerp, Belgium. 1044 of you that faced the awful Belgian traffic to get to NAV TechDays. And as I always say: who decided to not go, was awfully wrong! It’s a time for you to be able to be “fully” into the product. In an atmosphere that is especially set up for developers, to focus in the most comfortable way possible on the product, and its future.. . An atmosphere you will not be able to get at home .. .

So yeah, basically I’m writing a write-up like I have done for years: It was perfect again! So this write up might be getting boring – but I must say – NAV TechDays most certainly was not!

Yet again, all was very well organized, in my opinion. Great food, beer tasting, perfect session rooms (movie theatre quality), 90-minute deep dive sessions, perfect speaker infrastructure, big screens, … well, all an attendee (and also a speaker) could wish for. Great stuff! And thank you so much Luc, for taking the time, effort and above all the risk and responsibility for putting this together for us each year! Great stuff!

2 Pre-Conference Days

The biggest change with previous years was the extra Pre Conference Day. 2 instead of 1 this year. This way, the attendees had the chance to get even more value out of making the trip. Over 300 attendees decided to take the opportunity to dive into the deep dive workshops during the Pre-Conference Days (which I mentioned in my previous blog). I heard many great things about it, so I’m sure it’s going to be there on the next NAV TechDays as well. Fingers crossed :-).

All sessions are online

A big differentiator with all other conferences is the fact that all these sessions are highly repeatable (aren’t we all trying to get into this repeatability-mode? 🙂 ). What I mean is: they are all recorded and online, available for everybody – no matter if you attended the conference or not. Now how’s that for a community-initiative? I don’t know one conference that does that. This is a big differentiator, and when you look at the amount of views, it’s highly appreciated by the community.

Luc has put everything on his youtube-channel. Have a look at it. Highly recommended!

My NAVTechDays

For me, it was quite a busy conference. I had two Pre-Conference Days on “PowerShell Black Belt”. Two full days of PowerShell-ing that hell out of ourselves! I always enjoy telling people about PowerShell – I just hope all attendees enjoyed themselves as well :-). The feedback was overall quite OK, so I’m happy with it :-). It’s why I do it.

During the conference, I covered two sessions. That’s quite enough, I must say ;-). For me .. and probably also for you ;-). First session was together with Vjeko and Gary about “Bad Habits of NAV Developers”. It’s was meant to be a somewhat ludic session, and ended up to have been voted the best session of the conference (based on the points you gave on all the difference sessions). Very proud about that! You can watch it here:

My other session was somewhat more serious: “Best Practices in developing Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017 Extensions”. And to be clear: I was talking about Extensions v1: the PowerShell way. I got a comment that there was a bit too much PowerShell in it .. . Sorry for that .. in my opinion PowerShell is one of the “problems” people have with building Extensions .. so yes, I decided to give it a decent focus. Here you can watch that session:

NAVTechDays 2017

And yes, we’ll have a NAVTechDays next year as well! Needless to say that I’m very much looking forward to that! 🙂 .. . So book your agendas for next year 16th and 17th of November 2017!

Some impressions

I always like to end with some impressions of the conference:

One of the slides during our “Bad Habits” session…

One fun addition: a “throwable” microphone .. to throw to people that had questions. Fun! :-). Until Vjeko throws it and almost puts someone in the hospital ;-).

Me, being serious…

And less serious …

5.00 avg. rating (97% score) - 1 vote

Permanent link to this article: https://www.waldo.be/2017/01/24/navtechdays-2016-final-thoughts/

3 comments

    • Dave Machanick on January 24, 2017 at 1:44 am
    • Reply

    I think they should rename PowerShell to WaldoShell! (At least the NAV add-on).

      • waldo on January 25, 2017 at 11:48 am
        Author

      :-). I take that as a compliment 😉

    • Sylvain Roy on February 1, 2017 at 7:00 pm
    • Reply

    That was a first for me and enjoyed it a lot! I especially liked the pre-conference workshop (reporting) in particular. I also liked the fact that the presentations were honest and almost without salesy and marketing BS! One nice addition would be to have those pre-conference workshops videoed as well and made available. I don’t know how feasible that is without editing but anyway, the idea is thrown. Looking forward to joining you guys again next year!

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