A month or so ago, Amsterdam was again host to the Tridion Developer Summit. This is a great event for anyone involved with Tridion, and each year it goes from strength to strength. This year, a lot of the focus, understandably, was on the forthcoming release of Tridion Sites 9, which will be part of Tridion DX. We heard speakers from SDL and from the wider community talking on a variety of topics. In one sense, I suppose, the usual mixture, but there's always a certain excitement when a new major release is coming out. (Yes, I know we don't call them major's any more, but still, we're looking at brand new APIs that none of us have used yet: that's a major in my book!)

The talks covered everything from the new user interface, to the combined play with structured content that the DX platform will offer, to new services based on GraphQL (which is probably becoming the "must study" topic). Other speakers covered integrations and extension points and javascript and, well, you name it. If you spoke, and I haven't mentioned your bit, please don't take offence!

It was a great conference, which I thoroughly enjoyed; not least because of the chance to catch up with everyone. But a month later, I just want to share the thing that really blew me away and stuck with me. The new product release isn't finished just yet, but the scope is more or less fixed. If a feature isn't already in, then it probably won't be in Tridion sites 9. That said, the guys in R&D are not standing still, and they are already looking forward to the next thing. Which brings me to the buzz moment of this year's summit. I'm not sure if Likhan Siddiquee was even meant to be presenting in the main theatre at that moment, but well... Likhan's an enthusiast. If this guy's got some amazing new tech to show, try and stop him! (Good luck with that!) So he comes in and just kind of tags along after a couple of the other SDL presenters. He's showman enough that it could have all been staged, but he managed to make it seem as though... well... he just had this cool stuff on his laptop and.... did we maybe have five or ten minutes?

So he walks on stage carrying his kid - a babe in arms! Start em young, I suppose. Anyway child-care and work-life balance obviously hold no fears for Likhan. He hands off the baby to his able assistant, and proceeds to unveil the geeky goodies. What did he have? Nothing less than the Tridion kernel running on .NET core! Sure - this was a pre-preview. Hot off the press. No user interface, and only a bare-bones system, but sure enough he got it going from the command prompt with the "dotnet" command and proceded to start hitting service endpoints with a web browser. Wow!

It was a moment in time. You had to be there. I'm sure we'll be waiting a while to see a production version. For sure it won't make it into the 9 release, but who cares? Hey for a lot of people, they won't even notice. Nothing wrong with running Windows Server, is there? Still this will open up lots of possibilities for different kinds of hosting options, and for those of us who like to run a "fifth environment" it's going to be awesome. Everything on linux containers. What's not to like?

Thanks to all those who took part in the Summit. You were all great, but especially thanks Likhan for that inspiring moment!