TechEd 2011 – Day 2
…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.