Microsoft Techdays 2010

This year’s Techdays came at the right time. I am currently actively working on a project built with Silverlight and WCF RIA Services. So some of the sessions should be right up my alley. Overall it was a pretty good conference. The content was a lot more actual then last year, which meant that we got a lot of MIX10 content.

These are the sessions I attended:

• Silverlight 4 tour de force, with a little WPF sauce on top (Gill Cleeren & Katrien De Graeve)
• Developer Walkthrough: how we built De Kinderpuzzel (Boris Rogge)
• C# 4.0 and beyond (Anders Hejlsberg)
• A day in the life of a Silverlight/WPF Integrator (Laurent Bugnion)
• ASP.NET MVC 2: Ninja Black Belt Tips (Scott Hanselman)
• Building Windows Phone Applications with Silverlight (Giorgio Sardo)
• Understanding the Model-View-ViewModel pattern (Laurent Bugnion)
• Introducing the Windows Phone 7 Series developer experience (Charlie Kindel)
• Building business data-driven applications FAST using WCF RIA Services and Silverlight (Gill Cleeren)

So, let me give you a quick recap of some of the sessions I attended, and what I got out of it for myself as a Silverlight UI Developer. My first day started with Gill Cleeren & Katrien De Graeve giving us an overview of the new features that will be available in the new versions of Silverlight and WPF. It proves again that Microsoft is definitely going very fast in adding new features to the Silverlight platform. Most of those features I already mentioned in my previous post, but it was nice seeing some of this goodness in action. Now come on Microsoft, let’s release it and we really can start using it.

Another unexpected, but interesting session was the lunch session where Boris Rogge (metanous) gave us an insight into the architecture and code of the application used in the TV show De Kinderpuzzel. I liked his session because the story sounded so familiar: short deadline (3 weeks), last minute design changes and pragmatic choices in coding. The result worked an looked pretty nice. I sure would like to work on a MS Surface project one day (but preferably with a bigger deadline).

Next up was Technical Fellow Anders Hejlsberg about the new C# 4.0 features and most of the new stuff boils down to support for dynamic programming. This can be done through the dynamic keyword in C#. The following code shows the use of the dynamic keyword:

it let’s you call an object, for example a Javascript function on the HTML page or a COM Object without knowing it’s members at compile time. The actual call the the Add method will be resolved at runtime. Pretty cool stuff, it makes C# a dynamic language in a statically typed way way. If you want to know more about this, read this post by Scott Hanselman. At the end he shows us a demo of what the future has in store for the CLR.

Then Laurent Bugnion showed us some Blend goodness and a list of tools that can be very useful while integrating the Design into the actual application. I suppose his slides will be up later on, but I remember the following tools: Silverlight Spy, Kaxaml. He also reminded me that I should be using Blend more, because if I see him using the tool it all seems so easy. Why do I always end up editing the XAML manually? Because this can be a painful experience.

I am not actively working with ASP.NET anymore, so I had no expectations about Scott Hanselman’s session. It just appealed to me because of the word Ninja in the session’s title. After warning people that it was really a session for advanced ASP.NET developers, I still stayed in my seat and relaxed. He showed a lot of cool features, and especially  T4 (aka. Text Template Transtormation Toolkit) seems like a damn powerful tool and best kept Visual Studio Secret. I can’t actually explain what it does, but you can read all about it on his blog. The session was great and he was definitely the best speaker of the day. Too bad the session was a bit out of my league.

To end the long day, I decided to stay until the very end to attend the Windows Phone 7 Series session. Giorgio Sardo showed us some of the features already available in the current CTP version of the WP7 Developer tools. It all felt very familiar, so if you have some Silverlight knowledge you can go ahead and start creating apps for the Phone. You can debug your application on the emulator or directly on the device. This opens up the Market Place for a very large community of developers.

The session I looked forward to was the session about Model-View-ViewModel on the second day. I am currently working on a project that uses the MVVM pattern, and I was curious to see what the MVVM Light Toolkit could add for me. It was good to see that the implementation I did was very similar to the one in the Framework. Although I still have to get used to using those lambda expressions myself, I really likes the Messaging and Commanding framework. I am definitely going to use it, when I need it, and yes tomorrow I will start using lambda expressions myself. If you want to see his session checkout my previous post that contains his session at MIX10. The session was clear, nicely built up, and I will use it as a reference if I ever have to explain MVVM again to fellow developers.

To conclude, the Microsoft Techdays this year were a success for me. See you next year