…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.

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.