On the pre-conf day it feels like the conference is going to last forever, but all of sudden it is the last day…

DEV302 - Identify and Fix Performance Problems with VS Ultimate (Benjamin Day)

When I do performance coding, I do think the “fix” is the more interesting part. The “identify” is simply the boring stuff I have to go through to get to the “fix” part. This talk was totally focused on the “identify” part – and therefor for me, totally boring. And not much new stuff either, the last day could definitely have started better…

DEV335 - Improving Your Microsoft ASP.NET Application Performance with Asynchronous Pages and Actions (Tiberiu Covaci)

Ah, a fellow Swede… Good session that matched the title perfectly. Lot of things that I have been unaware of – or at some point in time had been aware of but now forgot. Yet again the full history of Begin/End, Async/Complete to the new async keyword. I don’t know if the speakers look at each other topics or if the track chair look – but this was my third session where this full history. Now, I like asynchronous programming so it really doesn’t matter that much to me – but could we use the time more effectively?

The twist in this talk was the asynchronous page directive in ASP.NET, and that was completely new to me – or perhaps as in the previous talk, something that I have been aware of but forgot because I never used it. Since I usually tends to do back-end or server stuff the async thing is on my radar, but it wasn’t really for page code. Now I have to have it there as well.

MID302 - AppFabric Caching: How It Works and When You Should Use It (Jon Flanders)

I might say that this was one of the reasons for going here. I’ve been working with AppFabric cache the last month at my current project. The bottom line for this session is that I think I got it all while working with it. Now, that might be feeling like wasting time to go to a session like this, but it’s actually kind of nice to get a confirmation that there isn’t anything else.

DEV377 - Ask Scott Hanselman

My only interactive session this year, with my favourite: Hanselman, and he delivered one more time. There were no specific topic, instead the audience asked questions from organizational questions about MS to specific technical details about lots of stuff – and lots of jokes as well.

The gem I bring with me from this session is Glimpse. I had not seen this tool before and I have to ask my more front-end focused colleagues if they use it. Hanselman describes it “like the FireBug client side debugger, except it's implemented in JavaScript on the client side with hooks in to ASP.NET on the Server Side” in a blog post.

Before the last session I ran to the exhibit hall book store to see if there were any books on sale and I bought two with 20% off.

DEV351 - Busy Microsoft .NET Developer’s Guide to the Microsoft Cloud (Ted Neward)

He started with a declaration that he would present any demos, that this would be a Power Point only talk and that anyone that was uncomfortable with this could leave if they wanted to. I remained in my seat somewhat sceptical, but it turned out to be one of more interesting talks of the week. Not the usual “hallelujah, do this and everything will be fine”, on the contrary he told us to be sceptical and careful about putting applications and/or data in the cloud.

An end session that gave us something to think about on our way home

…or day 3, it depends on if you count the pre-conf day as 1 or 0. Anyway the day started – perhaps not as focused as I should be – with

DEV340 - Tackle the Complexity of Async Calls in WPF and Silverlight (Brian Noyes)

He started with an overview of multithreading in general and the benefits and challenges that multithreading gives you.

He then did a quick review of the history of async call patterns in .net from Begin/End over Async/Completed and TPL & PLINQ. He continued with Async CTP and the new async keyword in C#, and at last he did a short detour to Reactive Extensions as well – a nice bonus, I really like that stuff. It takes me out of my ordinary path of thinking. Check it out or better, come to my talk about it on Wednesday at Valtech Tech Days.

I was very pleased with this talk and i didn’t felt at all as the morning session after the exhibit hall reception the night before.

DEV301 - The Future of Parallel Programming in the Microsoft .NET Framework (Danny Shih)

Parallel and async seem to go hand in hand, this turned out to be roughly the same talk as I just attended. Only more focused towards the new async stuff that’s in the pipe. The content was alright as so were the speaker – but he finished in 45 minutes so I felt a little bit disappointed. I mean, if you have a time slot of 75 minutes it would be OK to finish 10% early – like about 10 minutes, but 30 minutes early? Bad rehearsal I would say.

DEV355 - Orchard 1.1: Build, Customize, Extend, Ship (Sebastien Ros)

Completely brilliant session. A total walk through of (not perhaps) all features in Orchard. A good speaker with just the right amount of humour together with just right enough technical depth totally made my day. Originally I didn’t plan to see this session, I had another one scheduled but after all the talk yesterday about Orchard I had to see what is was – and I didn’t regret for a second that I switched session at the last minute.

And I got more sure than before that I definitely have to check this out – actually it’s now on top of my must-try-list.

DEV343 - Application Development with HTML5 (Brandon Satrom)

I’ve been to a fair amount of “development with HTML” talks before and all of them - including this one - are more about HTML5 than about developing. But since I don’t do a lot of HTML at all nowadays, it was a nice walkthrough of the stuff and he did it quite well. The one thing that he said got stuck in my mind hadn’t anything to do with HTML5 though, it was about the development process around IE9 and the upcoming IE10 – more early bits to developers that ever before.

MID307 - Make Yourself Comfortable and REST with Microsoft .NET (Howard Dierking)

I like REST, I like WCF, I like developing in .NET. This was an excellent description of how to make a REST service with WCF. Thank you, sir. Not that it’s hard or complicated, and I have played around with it a while ago and I think I got it then. But this talk explained it in a better way than I could pick up from other resources so whenever I'm about to make a REST service I will fast forward through this talk before I start.

So, it was time for Ray Ozzie with the friends "du jour" to talk about the front end tools - the keynote yesterday was all about the back end.

First of all he talked about the evolution of the PC and continued with looking at the differences as well as the similarities between development for the PC, the Web and the Mobile platform.

After that it was time for a quick walk thru of Windows 7. My first impression was that I didn't see anything new but small pieces of eye candy and then they talked about how easy it was to connect your work laptop to your home network and sharing music etc. so the second impression was that it was targeted towards the home and entertainment market.

I guess they planned it that way, that we should be a little bit confused and disappointed, because now they turned the focus on what it's going to be for developers and more tech centric information. It turns out that Windows 7 will help us developers interact more closely with OS, like Ribbon UI, Jump Lists, Multi-touch, Ink, DirectX etc. The goal is thst it should have decreased memory, disk I/O and power consumption and att the same time have increased speed (especially faster boot), responsiveness and scaling possibilities.

There was no time plan for release, but possibly a beta early next year and they hoped for a "three year release cycle experience" and that will place the release somewhere around late 2009 - early 2010 if my memory serves me right at this moment.

And then came ScottGu...

He started out with some talk about improvements for developers, the new WPF Toolkit that will work on all versions of Windows. He continued to talk about as well as demoing Visual Studio 2010. It looks nice with lots of functionality that I both have missed as well as functionality that I didn't know I've missed but as soon as I saw it I immediately knew that I would use it. There was a lot of talk about ASP.NET 4 and the web development experience in VS 2010 in general - WebForms, MVC and AJAX... and of course Silverlight with the Silverlight Tooolkit and the Silverlight Designer in VS 2010.

The keynote continued with demonstration and facts about the Live Mesh platform and the Live Framework, quite interesting actually. No directly impact on what I'm doing today but the potential is huge so as usual this topic goes to the list of "keep an eye on" or perhaps "should play with". The problem is that both those lists already contains quite a few things already...

The first keynote finished with a quick demo of Office 14, at first no big difference. But then they interactively did simultaneous update to the same document from to PC's and as a further bonus one of the word instances was Office Web which completely ran inside the browser - clearly competing with other online office suites.

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After a short break, the second keynote started...

Don Box and Chris Anderson entered the stage and completely blew my mind. The showed how to work with the fluffy stuff from yesterday - Windows Azure. The went through a complete example of how to build services and applications "in the cloud". Short, sharp but deeply enough they took away all the fuzziness about Windows Azure. Brilliant, thank you!

At first I was a little bit disappointed because the level was way to easy, at least way to easy to have categorized this session as "advanced". But after a while Phil Haack speeded up and showed the ASP.NET MVC Framework in a nice manner, and since I've just worked with one of the earlier CTP's it was nice to see the beta and to get a sense of where the product is now.

And as a bonus he called up Jeff Atwood, you know - the man behind CodingHorror blog. Jeff and a couple of more has built a new site, www.stackoverflow.com, with this ASP.NET MVC Framework and he shortly presented how he did it. It was relates to one of the Hanselminutes podcasts I did listen to on the flight to LA.

A common reflection here is that every demo or example of web apps so far here at PDC has some component of MVC in it. It may be accidental and due to some kind of hype factor, but it seem that even if MS say they will continue with WebForms their focus will be more on the MVC front in the future. Well and of course Silverlinght...

So, if you haven't looked at it buy now, it about time. Start at the ASP.NET MVC web site.

Optimizing Performance and Scalability of Distributed .NET Applications

I'm stretch out on the lawn outside the CCIB here in Barcelona with a big smile on my face after listening to Ingo Rammer. Totally brilliant session!

In the choice between this an Keith Brown on Securing ASP.NET Applications I choose Ingo Rammer and I don't regret it the least.  No shadow over Keith, I'll watch his session on the post conference DVD.

Now my toolbox is full of new tools for examine slow .NET applications and a couple of hints to solve them. I'm not exactly a novice in this area... and didn't thought I would learned that much. It is funny to be positively surprised.

He went through:

• Network
• SQL
• Memory

Partly from the angle of developing code and partly on judging and controlling products and parts that you bring in to the project. 

Integrating Membership, Role Management and Profiles in ASP.NET 2.0 Applications

Prosise... again. Brilliant...again.

He went through all the topics in the title with simple, clear and comprehendible examples. It turned out that I, not that surprisingly, over worked the work on the topic in my last project. But it wasn't that bad...

DEMO - Building a Distributed Solution with .NET 3.0

"This is a level 400 session... A few slides, then VS... WCF and WF in action...Tips, trick & pitfalls"

Sometimes, not that often, but sometimes it feels like it's going to fast. This was one of those occasions. This was a guy doing his own extensions to WCF to build a video streaming application. Some day I will sit down with the examples and look through to code and try to understand what went on, I'll guess it'll take me about 10-20 hours... 75 minutes wasn't enough.

Advanced Data Access Techniques with ADO.NET

Well... I would say advanced, but a thorough walk through of the data binding in Visual Studio 2005 so I'll give this session an OK.