It was time to do a face lift on the blog that pretty much have looked the same for 10 years:

But I wasn’t really fond of the idea of just fixing up the looks – the code for dasBlog hadn’t been touched for several years. Perhaps it was time to change blog engine as well. After having looked around a bit, for example this blog post by Hanselman, my eyes fell on MiniBlog by Mads Kristensen. A really small ASP.NET MVC based, open source, blog engine.

It was quite simple, just:

• Clone the code from GitHub
• Convert all the old dasBlog posts to MiniBlog format with the MiniBlogFormatter-tool.
• Create a custom theme based on one of the existing ones.
• Publish from Visual Studio.
• …and some DNS fixes, of course.

Bam! Done in less than an hour – I’m impressed how easy it was..

Still running in the cloud – on Azure.

As a developer I tend to think that Teched keynotes usually are to much focused on IT-pros, and usually not all that exciting. But this year I was surprised how interesting the keynote was. They had a shorter (?) big keynote for everybody and then we were split up in different Foundational sessions – it worked out pretty well.

Keynote

Cloud, cloud, cloud…

Phone, phone, phone…

Much talk about the cloud, much talk about the phone, and except for a short section about System Center – in which I have no interest, whatsoever – there were really nice stuff showed.

The sentence of the day was when Amir Netz demoed new BI-tools in Crescent and sorted/filtered 2.000.000.000 rows of data – “This is beyond wicked fast. This is the engine of the devil, right?” And I must agree, it was beyond wicked fast…

More interesting stuff came when Drew Robbins talked about next version of WP7, “Mango”. Yesterdays pre-conf on WP7 made me eager to start developing for this platform and with the new tool coming out for “Mango” this month it just increase my interest in this area.

Last Cameron Skinner showed upcoming features in VS “vNext”, but I don’t know if they really said when it’s about to be released – I thing it’s not settled yet. Anyway, one of the more interesting features is to be able to suspend my current work – shelf the changes and so on – when the boss comes with an urgent matter. And after having fixed it, be able to resume work exactly where I was before – not just getting back the shelved files, but restoring all windows and so on, so that VS looked exactly the same as when I suspended the work. And this just with one suspend and one resume button. He also showed how it will be possible to do storyboarding in PowerPoint for designers and/or advanced business/requirement analysts – I’ll have to try this one out before I can tell if this is good or bad.

Foundational session – The Microsoft Web Platform

Very interesting walk through of the current state and the close future of the web platform as Microsoft sees it. For me the bottom line was to look at and learn:

• NuGet
• WebMatrix
• Orchard

Look at really close and learn really well, that is. And of course to continue to improve the skills in ASP.NET MVC and Razor in general, but that wasn’t all that new.

In the afternoon there were ordinary breakout sessions and ad started with:

MID306 - Design Patterns, Practices and Techniques with the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus (Juval Löwy)

Now, I’ve seen Juval Löwy before – in fact an whole post conference day at DevConnection 2007 and this time I was more prepared for his particular style of delivering talks. This one did its job to deliver what the title stated but nothing more.

DEV349 - An overview of the MS Web Stack (Scott Hanselman)

Scott Hanselman is fantastic in delivering technical talks and even if he had his first demo crash in 8 years today he saved it brilliantly. This was about the same content as the foundational session before lunch – but more technical, more demos and because of that more close to my heart. It was interesting to hear that MS now does a lot of optimizations for “programmer happiness” and less work on optimizing the IDE for demo-style file-new-drag-and-drop scenarios.

This talk also emphasized the wisdom of this morning: learn NuGet, WebMatrix and Orchard.

DEV321 - Advanced Blend for Developer: Integrating MVVM and Designability (Pete Brown)

Not bad, but not a 300 level session and not that interesting – I will probably never work in Blend nor will the designers I work with. On the other hand, there were no other sessions in this time slot that seemed more interesting so… it wasn’t so bad that I left in the middle of the talk anyway, perhaps not just my focus topic.

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.

---

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.