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I have been to several developer conferences in Cape Town now, from the first ones in 2006 through to Mix Essentials in 2008, Dev Days in 2010 and now again in 2011, and this is the first one where you had to pay, which is not the worst thing, but still. I have also been to Internetix, the Internet Solutions conference and it gave me an opportunity to look at both the style of conference and the attendees. The feeling I got from Dev Days 2011 was that the energy levels werent that great, compared to say Mix Essentials where Brad Abrams did the demos. Strangely he still worked for Microsoft at the time. As the day went on Dev Days 2011 seemed to just fizzle out as interest in the talks waned. Is this how open source devs experience conferences? I mean aren’t we suppose to be passionate about technology and the environments we use the technology. Is it just about the day off from work or the lunch and free bag of goodies? My general feeling was that the presenters lacked some energy, they seemed rushed to get through their powerpoint slides and in some cases I got the feeling that they were a little unprepared. Maybe I am wrong. There were a few good moments though and code was shared, but I somehow felt that the ASP.NET MVC 3 session covered stuff I have already read about, and I was expecting some new features. Maybe some cool new syntax features would have been nice. I might also be too critical and might need to just appreciate it for what it was – Microsoft keeping developers interested just enough to keep them using Microsoft developer tools and technologies. And unashamedly I love the Microsoft toolsets.

Keynote

The keynote seemed to focus on a a few key areas, Windows Mobile Phone, Windows Azure (cloud computing) and the developer tools that can be used to develop applications for these platforms. Some interesting insights were shared in terms of where Microsoft sees itself positioned in the mobile market – 2nd by 2014. In the keynote a developer used Microsoft’s Web Matrix and something that stood out was that he renamed a plain html file to cshtml and it was ready for the Razor view engine. I also enjoyed the Eclipse demo that integrated with VSTFS, FROM Ubuntu no less, AND the code was written in Java (JSP). The VSTFS actually demonstrated how testing and source control can all be achieved with TFS, from different development platforms. The keynote also covered aspects of the Azure platform which I picked up on in a later session. Azure seems rather complicated and South Africans will only have it available in 6 months, which makes me less than reluctant to use it.

ASP.NET web development with MVC

The first session I attended actually focussed on scaffolding with entity framework 4.1, and did not go into a lot of depth. The presenter touched on the ASP.NET MVC execution process illustrating with a few diagrams how ASP.NET MVC was as much a part of ASP.NET as webforms was. He pointed out that ASP.NET MVC differed from ASP.NET Webforms by virtue of its viewing engines, with MVC using the razor view engine and the latter using the ASP.NET Webforms view engine. The diagram also illustrated that WebPages, used in the ASP.NET Web Matrix, used the Razor view engine. The presenter then showed how easy it is to create an entity framework 4.1 model from a code first perspective using standard POCO classes, and then how easy it is to create the necessary scaffolding for create/edit/view operations, including controller actions and views.

A lap around Internet Explorer

The second session I attended was a demonstration of Internet Explorer’s new features, including things like a new fresh UI experience, a fast JavaScript rendering engine, GPU-enabled graphics acceleration and a few other things. The session also showed off some of IE9’s developer tools, which to my mind will not make me switch from Chrome. I kind of like Chrome’s dev tools, and I’m not a Firefox user anymore really, but I’m not an IE9 convert either. Visually IE9 performed way better with one or two HTML 5 examples when compared to Chrome. The thing though is that IE9 can only run on Windows 7 and if Microsoft thinks that XP will totally disappear then well I think they might be wrong. Chrome runs on XP. IE 9 is nice, but I’m not convinced.

I’m exhausted! Will write part 2 tomorrow.

Those of you who haven’t noticed yet MSDN has changed its look and feel from the frame-based layout to a brand new layout. My first impressions are that it really rocks.

Reading the content feels much easier. I would have liked to see some more AJAX. Notably you can also switch to the old classic view.

I had a brief glimpse of the Google phone and I must say its not a pretty phone when compared to the iPhone. The other interesting thing to note is that the iPhone does not support Flash or Silverlight at this stage and that Microsoft will be looking at putting Silverlight on the Google phone. Silverlight 2 has also just been released.

Why would you want to use Powerpoint and Access together you may ask? I can give you a brief description of a scenario to illustrate the possible use of Access and Powerpoint, and I believe its always a good idea to narratively describe a problem (or solution) before you jump straight into it.

The church I go to every Sunday uses projectors to display hymns and scripture, and of course they use Powerpoint. For each sermon at our church we have a Powerpoint presentation that displays a certain number of hymns and certain parts of scripture. The order in which the scripture and hymns appear on the slides is pre-determined by our pastor’s liturgy. The liturgy determines in which order the hymns are sung and the scriptures are read. The hymns and scriptures might appear before and after each other. The key though is that the hymns and scripture are elements that are re-used the whole time, and are simply arranged within the liturgy, and theoretically you should not be re-creating the content for each sermon. Instead you should have a system in place that allows you to dynamically create the content as you need it. More specifically you should have a database that stores the scripture and hymn elements and have an interface that extracts the data as you need it and generates the content, which would be Powerpoint slides. So here I was thinking that there has to be some interoperability between Powerpoint and Access. On a simple user interface level this interoperability does not exist, but where it does seem to exist is in something called “Automation”. I found this MSDN article which uses VBA to achieve that exact result. It seems pretty simple at face value.