Visiting BASTA!

Last week I have been speaking at BASTA!, a major developer conference in Germany with 700 attendees and speakers. I attended several dev sessions and talked to a couple of community leaders. My own session was about optimizing code for virtual desktops.

There were some real surprises for me. First of all, the worlds of IT professionals and developers seem to reside in two different galaxies. There were sessions where the speakers made the clear statement that Win32 and .NET WinForms applications are outdated and that applications based on Windows Presentation Foundation are the new standard. When looking at my customer base, the world I live in is very different. Another speaker complained that he developed a beautiful Web-based application and his customer decided to run it through a Citrix XenApp environment and a published browser. He said that the performance was brilliant in his local development environment, but in his customer’s production environment it really sucks. Big surprise for him, but not for me. In another session Windows Azure was looked at as if it was the new standard infrastructure platform even if there is neither a final API nor an established price model, yet. It looks like these developers asume that if an app can be accessed on their laptops it is ready for large corporate environemnts.

My session was the only one during a three-day conference with up to ten parallel tracks that covered different aspects of virtualization. Some of the questions attendees asked me before and during my session almost knocked my socks off: “Is terminal services and application virtualization the same?”, “Is it true that desktop virtualization requires a remoting protocol?”, “What is a published application?”, “Can you confirm that Citrix ICA and Microsoft RDP don’t support WPF applications?” or “Why would anybody be so stupid to use a web browser in a virtual desktop instead of using the local browser?”. Don’t get me wrong, these questions came from smart people who do great jobs in their knowledge domain. There was a statement of another presenter that made me really think. He said that he tried to find about how presentation virtualization works so that he understands the impact it has on his daily work, but he was not able to find an adequate article in the Internet. It makes clear that IT pros and developers speak different languages, have different priorities, don’t share the same objectives - and don’t read or understand the same articles.

So what are the concequences? I truely believe that thought leaders in the IT pro world should educate developers about infrastructure topics and experts in Windows development should eductate IT infrastructure architects about how new applications are produced. The two groups should work more closely together as customers and users don’t care why applications do or don’t perform as expected. In most cases, users are result-oriented - and when things don’t work as expected they are disappointed of the IT guys in general. So it’s on us IT guys to adapt to this new world of user-oriented IT requirements.