Tech Ed–Post conference thoughts

Ok so the conference is over, I blogged about each day and now its time to reflect on the subjects covered:

• The new members of the family
• Agile
• CMS
• ASP.Net MVC / HTML 5
• WCF
• Silverlight/WPF
• Parallelism

The new members of the family

I took time at the conference to ensure that I got an overview on the 2 newest members of the development family web matrix and light switch as up to this point I hadn’t seen either and wanted to know if they would possibly fit into my toolbox and I believe the final verdict is that they I don’t see them an appearance in my work any time soon.

Agile

I attended a couple of sessions on Agile but although really good sessions I didn’t take a lot away from them, this was through no fault of the presenter I just happen to have a fair bit of experience in this area. See my post for details.

CMS

I got to see Umbraco & Orchard CMS’s demo’d by very knowledgeable people in both environments and it was interesting to see the differences between the two and its given me a head start in evaluating them.  It will be especially interesting next year when Umbraco bring out a MVC version to see how that stands up against Orchards native implementation.

I believe Umbraco is the more usable at this time simply because its not pre-release code and has a very large community supporting it.

ASP.Net MVC / HTML5

There were very few sessions on MVC with the majority of them being around the newly released MVC 3 and I didn’t manage to attend any of these.  I did get to attend a session on ‘Design Considerations for ASP.Net MVC Applications’ which whilst interesting wasn’t quite what I was expecting and again see my post on this for more details

The HTML 5 session was really good giving me a very good understanding of what “HTML 5” is, some of its capabilities but more importantly that whilst in a cross over period where HTML5 & HTML4.1 co-exist additional work will be required to allow the users a seamless experience whatever technology they are using.

WCF

There were a couple of sessions that I attended on WCF RIA & Data services both of which are newish additions to the WCF family and it was interesting to see the differences with RIA effectively staying SOAP based and Data Services moving to a REST based model.

Whilst the Data Services looks fantastic I have seen people I know struggle to be able to use it in quite the way that is promised but until I have a go at it myself I can’t say whether it is hard to do more than trivial applications, if I get to look at it I’ll blog about it.

Silverlight/WPF

The majority of the sessions I attended ended up being about Silverlight and/or WPF, this wasn’t explicitly by design but after all the furore over whether it was dead or not and I wanted to find out what the future held for Silverlight.

I think through the various sessions I attended and people I spoke to that the original idea of Silverlight being the cross platform technology from Microsoft is not longer the case but it is far from dead and has a future in the creation of LOB applications for the enterprise and as ‘islands of richness’ in general web sites much like the way that flash is used now.

Parallelism

There were a lot of sessions on parallel programming which is not surprising given that C# 4 has introduced the Task Parallel Library and the new CTP for the Asynchrony functionality.

Due to various scheduling issues I only managed to attend one session but it was a brilliant session which was less about the actual technology and more about how you could apply it to gain the performance benefits it promises.

Summary

I found this conference interesting in that my team got to decide a fair number of the sessions I went to rather than me simply picking the ones I may attended otherwise.

I also prioritised these sessions as we are about to start Silverlight development in work and as such I wanted to know as much as I could about the subject and ensure that we were making the right decision to do the development in the technology.

I think that the conference was good but perhaps could do with a little more developer focused content, in the past there has been an entire week given over to just developers.