Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Visual Studio Live! Day One Sessions

Apparently I forgot to publish this yesterday. Major FAIL.

Another day down at Visual Studio Live! It has been another great day, The key note speaker was good this morning and the sessions were good. I may not have selected the best sessions to go to, but that is on me and not the presenters. Hopefully, I will choose the correct sessions tomorrow.

The key note speaker, Jay Schmelzer, started the day off with a speech on The Future of Application Development - Visual Studio 2015 and .Net 2015. Microsoft has added some great features in VS 2015 and .Net 2015. I think one of the biggest moves is the cross platform support and development that is now available. A few different partnerships allow this, Zamarin and Cordova. Another feature I thought interesting is the ability to enforce your own code standards. Pretty cool!

A feature I think will help when deugging issues is the new time elapsed shown in the right in the coding window. Not more finding the stop watch in Google! Oh man, there are more enhancements and awesome enhancements. I can't wait to start using all of them and actually being able to understand them better (I wrote down more enhancements in my notes, but was in so much Aw I didn't write down all the needed details and I don't want to screw up when the changes actually work). I have VS 2015 installed and am excited to use the enhancements.

The first session I went to was A Tour of Azure for Developers with Adam Tuliper. I should have read the description and title a little more but we are exploring options with Azure at work and I thought the session would help. I learned a lot about Azure and that there are a lot of services provided by Azure. The session was pretty much talking about Azure and what you can do with Azure. There is a lot, so I have a lot more reading to figure out how to use Azure and the services that will be useful to use.

Next up, From ASP.NET Site to Mobile App in About an Hour with Jordan Matthiesen. This was one of those great sessions that talked about how to integrate already working HTML/CSS/JS code and use Apache Cordova to migrate it to an app using full screen Webview. The app detects when the user is offline and then decides how this should be handled. There are different options like having a note appear that says, "Sorry you are offline. Try again later", using App Cache, IndexedDB, or WebSQL. Not all options work with all the different platforms (and I am sure I missed some of the options Jordan mentioned). What it comes down to is selecting the correct service that works for the platforms you need.

I then headed to Defensive Coding Techniques in C# with Deborah Kurata. This was a great session!
What is defensive coding? Exception Handling, what not to do, well defined interfaces, expected behaviors, clear intent, best practices, and I am sure the list could go on and on. Deborah mentioned quality, comprehension, and predictability. The short version (I took the most notes at this session):

  • Clean code is easy to read, clear intent, simple, minimal, and thoughtful. 
    • Clear purpose
    • Good Name - Reflects purpose
    • Focused code
    • Short length (only as long as it needs to be)
    • New features in C# 6 help make code clean (or does it?)
  • Automated testing, well...this makes sense. Testing your code is good, and if you can automate it, all the better! Methods need to return something so they can be tested
The last session I went to was Reusing Logic Across Platforms with Kevin Ford. This is the one that I feel was the most difficult for me to understand. I don't understand patterns as well as I should have to attend this session. It is good to have a reference to the patterns so I know what is available and maybe I will have a light bulb come on when I understand this. Kevin was good and discussed cross platform depends on what the user expectations are. He talked about using Zamarin and that we need to look at when it makes sense to share code and went into some patterns to help share code and where they are all different. I will be revisiting the notes to this session soon (I hope).

That was the day! I ended it by eating at CowFish (a sushi burger fusion thing)

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