Another day down and another day of learning and hopefully I have learned how to hit publish and actually put a blog post out to the interwebs. I picked better sessions today, I didn't feel so overwhelmed and felt like I had a better understanding of what the presenters were discussing. Well, that is except for the dependency injection session I attended, but at least I was not like a deer in headlights like I was the first time I heard about dependency injection.
We started out with a key note by Don Jones and Brian Randell about DevOps. I am seeing a theme, DevOps is an important topic. On Monday I attend the Triple D session where we spent a lot of time talking about DevOps. There are numerous sessions on DevOps and there was today's key note speech on the subject. I agree and it isn't just something we will talk about today and not hear about it anymore. A lot of what they discussed we heard on Monday during the workshop. One new topic was an expansion of the why. There were two main reason: 1. Clients will get the product faster and will be happier (faster bug fixes) and 2. The competition may already be doing this and will have quicker time to market. If they deliver faster, how do you keep up? We have to adopt DevOps to remain competitive.
Next up, let's Write a Windows 10 App: A Basic Introduction to Universal Apps with Billy Hollis. I enjoyed seeing Billy earlier in the week and today did not disappoint. Billy has an entertaining way of presenting and is able to keep The session was very helpful and although I do not code much in XAML (we have two applications that use it and I only code when we have bugs) I feel that I took away some good bits of information to help when I do code in XAML. Billy showed us some great tricks in XAML and showed some basic examples like how to do some layout. He kept reminding us that XAML does what it is told and each element has one job. A grid won't scroll, you have to had a scrolling control if you want i to do that. He showed how to get a tab like feel in Windows Universal App (after all that is where he was focusing with the XAML examples) and showed us other things such as data binding and data templates. More things for me to take back and look more into.
I decided to stick with Billy and do his next session called Designing and Building UX for Finding and Visualizing Data in XAML Applications. First thing Billy told us is that he doesn't write too much XAML anymore. He uses tools to help him write the XAML. The tools have come a long way and provide much better XAML without much need to write it on our own. Billy showed us a cool cattle management app with smiley faces to show how the client feels. Better than a score, everyone knows what a frown means! How do you accomplish that? ScaleTransformations (along with layers). Really cool idea and I hope I can take it back and use it in our apps. Fluid movement behaviors when resizing windows, get the code from Blend. He gave us ideas on a lot of cool transformation ideas and tools to help with XAML coding. There are a lot of cools things that we can do to make apps look awesome.
I attended another session about Xamarin. This one was called Stop Creating Forms in Triplicate - Use Xamarin Forms with Matt Milner. I felt Matt spoke much more on my level from the session I went to yesterday. I learned something I hadn't heard about Xamarin, if you don't have a Mac it is hard to develop in iOS but if you have a Mac you can develop for both iOS and Android. Anyway, Matt went through an example of a cool Nerf gun inventory app, probably used to make sure his boys aren't hiding any of the guns. He showed how shared code can work on both Windows and Androids phone (emulator of course). It is pretty sweet how the Xamarin is able to take the same code and make it look like a native app on both platforms. Of course, it isn't 100% and you have to make some changes for the different platforms. He showed us how to do that. It is all a question of if the defaults work, or how to get the appearance you need. With each app you need to ask, which is right for cross platform, Cordova or Xamarin?
Then we go on to the dependency injection session. This was presented by Jeremy Clark and was called DI Why? Getting a Grip on Dependency Injection. Now we had talked about dependency injection at work once. In that discussion I didn't understand a word that was being said. So, I thought take the session with Jeremy and learn some more about it. After all, it was made as an introductory class. I still felt confused, and that is not Jeremy's fault. I walked away and talked through why I was still confused with my coworker, Peter, and started to clear some of my own questions by talking through why I was confused. Jeremy was great and Peter helped clear it up. I think I need to use dependency injection (luckily we already use it at work) to get a better feel for the how and hopefully help me with the why.
We finished the night with a Luau Dessert sponsored by Amazon. It was a fun time. I talked with a few new people and had some dessert. A good way to finish the night. One more day of sessions!
We started out with a key note by Don Jones and Brian Randell about DevOps. I am seeing a theme, DevOps is an important topic. On Monday I attend the Triple D session where we spent a lot of time talking about DevOps. There are numerous sessions on DevOps and there was today's key note speech on the subject. I agree and it isn't just something we will talk about today and not hear about it anymore. A lot of what they discussed we heard on Monday during the workshop. One new topic was an expansion of the why. There were two main reason: 1. Clients will get the product faster and will be happier (faster bug fixes) and 2. The competition may already be doing this and will have quicker time to market. If they deliver faster, how do you keep up? We have to adopt DevOps to remain competitive.
Next up, let's Write a Windows 10 App: A Basic Introduction to Universal Apps with Billy Hollis. I enjoyed seeing Billy earlier in the week and today did not disappoint. Billy has an entertaining way of presenting and is able to keep The session was very helpful and although I do not code much in XAML (we have two applications that use it and I only code when we have bugs) I feel that I took away some good bits of information to help when I do code in XAML. Billy showed us some great tricks in XAML and showed some basic examples like how to do some layout. He kept reminding us that XAML does what it is told and each element has one job. A grid won't scroll, you have to had a scrolling control if you want i to do that. He showed how to get a tab like feel in Windows Universal App (after all that is where he was focusing with the XAML examples) and showed us other things such as data binding and data templates. More things for me to take back and look more into.
I decided to stick with Billy and do his next session called Designing and Building UX for Finding and Visualizing Data in XAML Applications. First thing Billy told us is that he doesn't write too much XAML anymore. He uses tools to help him write the XAML. The tools have come a long way and provide much better XAML without much need to write it on our own. Billy showed us a cool cattle management app with smiley faces to show how the client feels. Better than a score, everyone knows what a frown means! How do you accomplish that? ScaleTransformations (along with layers). Really cool idea and I hope I can take it back and use it in our apps. Fluid movement behaviors when resizing windows, get the code from Blend. He gave us ideas on a lot of cool transformation ideas and tools to help with XAML coding. There are a lot of cools things that we can do to make apps look awesome.
I attended another session about Xamarin. This one was called Stop Creating Forms in Triplicate - Use Xamarin Forms with Matt Milner. I felt Matt spoke much more on my level from the session I went to yesterday. I learned something I hadn't heard about Xamarin, if you don't have a Mac it is hard to develop in iOS but if you have a Mac you can develop for both iOS and Android. Anyway, Matt went through an example of a cool Nerf gun inventory app, probably used to make sure his boys aren't hiding any of the guns. He showed how shared code can work on both Windows and Androids phone (emulator of course). It is pretty sweet how the Xamarin is able to take the same code and make it look like a native app on both platforms. Of course, it isn't 100% and you have to make some changes for the different platforms. He showed us how to do that. It is all a question of if the defaults work, or how to get the appearance you need. With each app you need to ask, which is right for cross platform, Cordova or Xamarin?
Then we go on to the dependency injection session. This was presented by Jeremy Clark and was called DI Why? Getting a Grip on Dependency Injection. Now we had talked about dependency injection at work once. In that discussion I didn't understand a word that was being said. So, I thought take the session with Jeremy and learn some more about it. After all, it was made as an introductory class. I still felt confused, and that is not Jeremy's fault. I walked away and talked through why I was still confused with my coworker, Peter, and started to clear some of my own questions by talking through why I was confused. Jeremy was great and Peter helped clear it up. I think I need to use dependency injection (luckily we already use it at work) to get a better feel for the how and hopefully help me with the why.
We finished the night with a Luau Dessert sponsored by Amazon. It was a fun time. I talked with a few new people and had some dessert. A good way to finish the night. One more day of sessions!
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