Alain Hufkens {Rich Interactive Applications Developer}

Microsoft Techdays 2009

This week I went to the Microsoft Techdays in Belgium. I have not been doing a lot of stuff with Silverlight lately, but still I was curious if I could catch something new or see some cool demos that finally show the power of Silverlight or WPF.

The first day started with the keynote from which I missed the introduction thanx to the massive traffic jams on the E313. It was a well rehearsed slick demo that showed how easy it is to develop an application using the different solutions. After the introduction by Hans Verbeeck, Gill Cleeren showed us the Silverlight implementation of an application that visualizes data gathered from a Garmin GPS called CycleTracks.

Peter Himschoot showed us how easy it was to recreate that same application into WPF. A lot of code and XAML can be shared between WPF and Silverlight. You can read more about the application in this article. Peter is an excellent presenter, but in this case I didn't see the added value of the WPF application because the only thing it it can do extra is parsing the Garmin XML file. Then Gregory Renard tried to show us how he created a similar application for the Microsoft Surface device. Surface is definitely a very cool device, and I wouldn't mind getting my hands dirty in writing an application for it. But with a price tag of minimum 11.000 Euros I suppose I would need a very generous sponsor

Katrien De Graeve showed us a preview of the new features in Windows 7 and especially the multi-touch features will be cool the play with in the future. Yep, multi-touch is the new hype, everything has to be multi-touch nowadays. I almost forgot Windows Azure which is Microsoft's answer on cloud computing and services. It makes it easy for developers to deploy their applications on Microsoft hosted servers.

The keynote was perfectly presented but yet, I expected more from it. One word of advice maybe: next time make an application that really shows of the power of Silverlight and WPF and put a bit more effort on the looks. Sure it is a conference for developers, but the as they said themselves User Experience becomes more and more important, also in the business applications of the future.

I didn't catch all the sessions but here is a small summary of what i have seen:

• .NET Continuum: ASP.NET, AJAX, Silverlight and WPF (Laurent Bugnion)
• Silverlight CoreCLR: Bringing the power of .NET to the net (Andrew Pardoe)
• Under the hood in Silverlight's controls skinning framework (Gill Cleeren)
• LINQ in breath - Querying everything everywhere (Bart De Smet)
• Live coding Silverlight and WPF (Laurent Bugnion)
• ASP.NET 4.0 what is coming? (Scott Galloway)

I really enjoyed the presentation of Bart De Smet about LINQ. I haven't used LINQ yet, and if there is one thing that Silverlight might have as an advantage over Flex is that cool stuff like LINQ is also available in Silverlight. I never saw Bart De Smet give a presentation before but this might as well be the most technical session of the conference and yet it was very good. He lost me from time to time, but the general idea was very clear to me. Pretty cool stuff what you can do with Extension methods and Lamba expressions.

I also liked the talk from Andrew Pardoe about the CoreCLR. First time I saw a guy from Microsoft using an non-MS application like VI in a demo. We got an insight about the implementation of the CoreCLR which is the plug-in that you download into your browser and which contains the Silverlight runtime.

In the other sessions I learned a couple of new things about Silverlight, but especially the WPF and Silverlight sessions could have been a bit more advanced (like the LINQ session). I had too many deja vue's from previous sessions. Seriously, if I see a developer create a linear (or why not radial) gradient brush one more time... That's a job for a designer, so take a designer with you on stage or don't

The Techdays are also a great opportunity to meet ex-colleagues, network with peers and collect pens (lot's of them). I have met some interesting people, saw some interesting sessions so I would say it was a succes (except for the power outage and the disappearing fridges on day two). I hope that Steve Ballmer will be there next year to cheer on the crowd.