Techdays 2010

For the last 3 days (March 30 – April 1) I was at Techdays 2010. This was the first tech conference I have ever been to, but I enjoyed it. I was however saddened by the low amount of attention to VB.Net and the complete lack of attention to Windows Forms.

I went to the following sessions. I will give a short review for each session. I will have lots to blog about.

First day

The first day was all about the new NET. framework and was well presented by Matt Milner. Allthough he did not have the time to go in depth and I had the impression that they spent too much time on the less important frameworks like Workflow foundation.

So here they are.

  • What’s new in .Net Framework 4.0
  • What’s new in ASP.Net 4.0
  • What’s new in Workflow Foundation 4
  • Entity Framework / Data Services in .Net 4.0
  • What’s new in WCF 4

Second day

On the second day the real conference started.

  • Developer Keynote: Trends and future directions in programming languages by Andres Hejlsberg. The man knows what he is talking about. Not sure I remember anything else from this session apart from the fact that there is still lots to do and not enough time to do it.

  • Silverlight 4 tour de forec, with a little WPF 4 sauce on top by Gill Cleeren. I am impressed by Silverlight you can do many nice new things with SL 4 and I think it is finaly time to use it. They only now added printing support which I think is essential for any app.

  • Lunchtime session about the kinderpuzzle. How they made an application for the Microsoft Surface that was used in a TV program. Looked very cool and pretty easy 😉 to do.

  • HTML 5 and Internet Explorer 9 by Giogio Sardo. IE9 is cool and fast and Giorgio is a good presenter.

  • ORM with ADO.Net Entity framework in .Net 4.0 by Kurt Claeys. After this session I know I don’t want to use EF just yet.

  • ASP.Net MVC 2: Ninja Black Belt Tips by Scott Hanselman. Scott was funny as usual and the tips were great but since I don’t use ASN.Net MVC just yet I will probably have forgotten them by the time I will need them.

  • Making TDD work using Visual studio 2010 by Bart Wullems. Nothing I didn’t already know and do. It’s just a shame that his tests didn’t start by being red most of his tests just went from green to green.

Third day

  • UnKeyNote – Lap Around .Net 4 By Scott Hanselman.

  • What’s new in .Net 4’s Common Language Runtime by Bart De Smet. The man knows his stuff and it shows, a more in depth view of what changed.

  • Lunchtime session: How to make your blog suck less by Scott Hanselman. Needless to say our blog doesn’t suck so we are doing everythig right, let’s move on ;-).

  • Visual Studio 2010 IDE tips by Sara Ford. Very cool session you can find all the tips on her blog also the only session I really saw VB.Net for more than a few seconds.

  • Moles: Replace any .Net method with your delegate by Peli de Halleux. COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLL. Not really a replacement for mocking but sure to be used for those edge cases where you have to mock unmockable things like DateTime.Now. But it was kinda slow.

  • Software Testing with Microsoft Visual studio 2010 by Brian Keller. About Manual testing made eassier and more streamlined. Looked cool.

  • What’s new in Office 2010 for developers by John Durant. Well Open XML seems to be the way forward to create your word documents via code. It is a lot quicker than using the interop.

Conclusion

Things I will investigate and perhaps blog about.

  • Lazy(Of T)
  • IObservable(Of T)
  • IObserver(Of T)
  • SortedSet
  • Contr- and Covariance of Generic collections
  • Parallel extensions and tasks.
  • ExpandoObject
  • String.Join
  • String.Concat
  • BigInteger
  • Microsoft Expression Web 3
  • Application compatibility program.
  • Moles
  • No-PIA

Nerddinner

After the last session. I went to a nerddiner. We were joined by the very famous Scott Hanselman, Charlie Kindel and Sara Ford. Of course the organisation was a mess. Back in the day I asked Scott if he was up for a nerddinner while he was here and he said yes and he put me in contact with Catherine De Graeve who in turn put me in contact with Gill Cleeren who then made reservations and used VISUG to make people aware of the event and to register for the event. There were about 26 people that registered … On the day we of course had 43 people show up and a restaurant that wasn’t ready. But they gave us a free drink and everything turned out well in the end ;-). And now I’m going to sleep for the rest of the weekend.