Tech Ed – Day 4

Ok so last day of the conference and it was only half a day with 3 sessions and as expected I had started understanding where everything was so I didn’t have to walk so much.

So the sessions that I attended today were;

• Your Questions on MVVM Answered
• Light up on Windows 7 with WPF and Silverlight
• WCF Data Services A Practical Deep Dive

Your Questions on MVVM Answered – Laurent Bugnion

So first session of the day was an interactive session all about the MVVM pattern, Laurent commented that he expected nobody to turn up as it was the last day of the conference and the first session of the day but the room was full with people wanting to have their questions answered.

Before Laurent started taking questions he quickly restated the MVC pattern and then MVC with passive view before describing the MVVM pattern and the advantages of using it.

Then he started taking questions which ranged from better control over a drag ‘n drop data source to should you include code in the code behind.  Laurent answered all the questions and where possible showed code demo’s of the problem and solution so you could better grasp what scenario you may come across and how to solve it.

The session seemed to be over all to quickly but I hope I’ll be able to side step some common issues when doing development using MVVM.

Light up on Windows 7 with WPF and Silverlight – Pete Brown

So if you’ve been following my blog posts you’ll have noticed that I’ve attended several sessions with Pete, this wasn’t by design rather Pete just happened to be presenting interesting topics in the various timeslots.

So this session was focused on what extra stuff you could do when developing on Win 7 and the extra UI features available.

From the Silverlight perspective it was all about ‘Out Of Browser’ (OOB) applications and what OOB offered you and to get the most out of OOB you really need it to run with elevated privileges because that then gives you access to more functionality on the desktop like the speech API and automating MS Office.

WPF has a load more functionality that generally seems to revolve around the task bar and the functionality available with the task bar item such as being able to show a progress bar on the applications task bar icon, adding jumplist functionality, etc.

Pete finished off the session by showing how easy it was to connect and work with external sensor devices like GPS or a joystick when you used .Net 4.0 and WPF.

WCF Data Services A Practical Deep Dive – Mario Szpuszta

The last session of the conference was all about WCF Data Services and oData and it was obvious from the beginning that Mario knew his subject matter.

He began with a quick overview and demo of oData and how you are able to use it; with this done he built his own oData service, WP7 client and showed the phone consuming the data.

With the WP7 client completed he then moved on to creating a console application that would allow not only consuming data but also updating and inserting data.  Unfortunately he ran into a couple of problems but it was interesting to how he solved the problems including how to use fiddler to debug the service and the messages being passed around.

Unfortunately Mario didn’t manage to cover everything he wanted to but he promised to make all slides and code available for download so that we could look at it ourselves in more detail.

Summary

So today was sort and sweet and for the majority of it revolved around Silverlight, WPF and MVVM and I found all the sessions useful and have definitely taken away things to look at and explore in the future.

As per the other days I have more extensive notes for my team but if you want them drop me a line and I’ll sort them out for you.