I made it to the final day of TechEd with my brain still intact and am almost completed with the template for a Phillips 66 Branded Single Page Application Template based on the SPA session yesterday so I think the conference has been a success. I am brimming with ideas that I can take back and help to make our development staff more effective with (and I got 14 different t-shirts).
Entity Framework in Core Business Applications and Domain-Driven Design Approaches – Julie Lerman – @julielerman – [Channel 9 Session Info]
This session made me wish that I had gone to one of the three other Domain Driven Design (DDD) sessions. Julie admitted at the very beginning of the session that she was still in the process of learning DDD and how to best use it in your application development. She admitted that she is still trying to break herself of habits and mindsets developed over the last 25 years that she has been a developer. Based on what I learned at the session, I want to do more investigation on DDD because I think that it will help multi-developer teams develop faster as well as have the potential to make applications faster because they are only making Entity framework load up information related to the portion of the application that the user is currently working in. One other takeaway is that DDD is a drastic mind shift from the way current development at most companies is done and it may be a case of “the view is not worth the climb” type of scenario, but it definitely warrants more investigation.
Hardcore Debugging – Andrew Richards – [Channel 9 Session Info]
Wow, when I signed up for this class, I was expecting it to be Visual Studio debugging…man was I wrong. I saw way too much hex code for my tastes. I am thankful for guys like Andrew, but that is not my cup of tea. This session was essentially about Windows debugging using different analysis tools. If you go to the Channel 9 Session Info you can see what tools he uses, then go to his Channel 9 show Defrag Tools to learn how to use them. I think I will stick to tools where F9, F10, & F11 are your best friends.
Serious Web Services: Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Web API, OData, & More – Daniel Roth – [Channel 9 Session Info]
Daniel did a really good job making something that could be extremely dry into a very interesting talk. He started talking about all the ways that Microsoft has addressed web based services in the past, then made recommendation around which ones not to use. Then, he went into a comparison of SOAP vs… REST, ending on the fact that you should be using RESTful services in most cases. He did also comment on when you should use SOAP services to be fair to both sides. Then, he talked about OData and how it is supported in the different technologies. Finally, he talked really quickly about SignalR as he ran out of time.
Understanding Dependency Injection and Those Pesky Containers – Miguel Castro – @miguelcastro67 – [Channel 9 Session Info]
I was already cracking up before the talk even started, the man is hilarious (his joke about Canadian Formula 1 racing being called Formula 1-eh was awesome). This session was meant to be an intro course on dependency injection. While I had already used dependency injection in the past, I still wanted to get more familiar with the concept. Miguel did a great job explaining what dependency injection was and why in our environment of programming you HAVE to write loosely coupled code that can be easily tested. He then demonstrated using mocking code and listed the available mocking frameworks such as:
He then explained the idea of Dependency Injection Containers that allow a developer to properly do dependency injection. The libraries that he demonstrated were:
- Unity
- Ninject
- Castle Windsor
- As well as his own home grown Container class
I would have to say that this was probably one of the most practical sessions of the conference. If I were to list the top 5 sessions that I went to this week in terms of most practical to use in my day to day job, they would be (listed in order or attendance):
Overall, I thought the conference was very informative and can definitely see the benefit to my company from the things I learned this week.