DevDays 2004 Belgium - Innovation through Integration

Just before the Keynote started, they showed a robot driving around, bringing a beer, controlled by a PDA. Developed by students from 'KU Leuven'.

And another nice thing was that we, developers, all come on time. The entire room was filled, everyone was there on time. Which apparently only happens with us, all other kinds of people tend to be late :)

First up was Steve Riley (the picture they have there totally didn't look like him at DevDays :p), with the Keynote: "Innovation through Integration".

He first kinda summarized what innovation already has happened over time, and what will happen in the future.

One quote from that was that we at one point in history figured out to save paper by putting everything digitally online, but then came the laserprinter. The laserprinter is the reason why rain forests disappear, people print a page with a font, decide it doesn't look good, print another font, etc ;)

But the most interesting part for me was the one about security. He spoke about what you have to keep in mind when designing your apps, never add security when it's done, build it in from the start.

One of the things he told he was still afraid of, were keyloggers. Therefore you should never login to something private on a kiosk or something.

Something else was, cars now have a lot of processors as well. And they can fail as well, they even can be rebooted. But in that context he added one very nice question:

"Who of you would today trust your pc with your life?"

Nobody did, so that means there's still a long way to go.

He also talked about the Windows AntiVirus API. Where other AV packets can run onto as well, and you can have multiple AV scanners simultaneous as well.

Here's another quote to think about:

"How much security do you need?" "As much as you need until you die." ;-)

Some words on the integrated part are, integrated training, when you buy a Windows product, you don't have to buy an extra training course, build it into the Help.

Also, dynamic Help. Why should a pro get the same help text as a beginner? The level will always go to the lowest one, and the pro will get all these help he already knows.