Guathon London

Today I went to the Guathon event in London at the Odeon Covent Garden, this meant I had to get up at 4:30 this morning to catch a train to get me to the event on time which wasn’t nice.

I managed to get to the venue by 8:30 but the venue wasn’t open and the pavement got crowded as more and more dev’s turned up but the doors opened at 9 just after 9:30 we were ready to go and what was nice was free wifi access which made tweeting easier for everybody.

The day kicked off with a session on VS2010 and ASP.NET 4.0 Web Development where Scott firstly went through changes/enhancements to visual studio IDE which turned up some useful information (such as being able to change intellisense to a consume mode to make TDD easier by pressing CTRL+ALT+SPACE), and then Scott went onto the changes to web forms in .Net 4.0 showing things such as the QueryExtender for Linq data sources to allow users to enter in free text type searches without you having to add code to change your Linq provider, SEO toolkit and lots of other goodness.  You definitely got the impression the ASP.Net webforms is far from dead in Microsoft’s eyes which is contrary to a lot of what you hear in the blogosphere.

The first session overran by approx 30 minutes which resulted in the second session ASP.Net MVC 2 being split over lunch break and some of the demo’s dropped to enable Scott to get through as much material  as possible.

During the lunch break the heaven’s decided to open and so more than a few people came back a little wet (I thought I was bad but @plip probably wins as he was soaked).

The 3rd session was run by Mike Ormond who talked about Windows Phone 7 development, which was very interesting and judging by the twitter comments generated a lot of debate about the platform.  At the end of the day I caught up with Matt Lacey (he runs the WP7 user group) and asked him about his thoughts on WP7 had a brief, but interesting, conversation about the platform, what Microsoft are doing and what may happen in the near future.

By the time we got to the fourth session we were running late so we didn’t break for coffee but ploughed on with ‘First Look at Web Futures: ASP.NET MVC 3, SQL CE and IIS Express’ with Scott having about 45-50 minutes to fit a 90 minute presentation into, including building an app from scratch.

First Scott discussed IIS Express and SQL CE and both look very promising, I will be eagerly awaiting their release, then Scott went on to create an app showing the use of Code first and the Razor engine  (I particularly liked the Razor engine syntax it looks very clean and I will have to have a play with it when I get the chance).  Then with time rapidly running out Scott did Dependency Injection in MVC3 in 8 minutes showing how to use a DI framework, he used Ninject in the demo, to remove your coupling and allow for good unit testing.

All in all a very good day was had by all and Scott was on form coding samples, answering questions and generally being knowledgeable on the development environment, and Mike did a very good presentation on WP7 just a shame he couldn’t give us all one to play with.

A very big thanks must also go to Phil Winstanley and Dave Sussman for helping to arrange the whole event, well done guys you did good.