Today marks the end of the sessions for Visual Studio Live! 2015 Orlando. I must say that it was a great experience. Not having done any tech conferences before I have nothing to compare to, but I feel the sessions were very informative and had good presenters.I would be interested to compare if I come back next year and have another year of coding experience. Will I go to the same sessions? Or, will I select more difficult classes? Would I stick with mostly Visual Studio classes? All questions that I hope that I will be able to answer next year. I think that I picked pretty good sessions for my level of knowledge today.
The first session I attended was Getting Started with ASP.NET 5 with Scott Allen. I actually have taken a few courses on Pluralsight. It was nice to be able to see him and put a face to the name (although Pluralsight has pictures it isn't the same as the real life version). ASP.NET 5 has some really great features. It can be used cross platform! That seems to be a theme we have been hearing this week, Microsoft is helping developers by providing solutions, either their own or through partnerships, that allow cross platform deployment. AWESOME! Microsoft really is trying to reach out to the younger developers/generation that may not be tied to the Microsoft way of life.
We saw another awesome enhancement with ASP.NET (and I believe we saw it working with XAML the other day) and that is that you can make changes to C# code while debugging. No need to stop debugging, make the change, and then start debugging again to see if the code worked. I can't quantify how much time that will save but I know it will be a nice chunk of time. There were a few other changes that were discussed like faster performance, no csproj file needed, and more. I am excited to take a look at everything else that can be done!
Next, User Story Mapping with Philip Japikse. I don' have many notes on this session but there is a reason. Philip actually made us be social and do an activity in groups of six to eight. By group activity I mean that we all had Post It notes to develop a story of getting up in the morning until we left for work all without talking. We did it without talking so that no one person become the Alpha and took control. We had to work through the entire process of making the story and then deciding what we didn't have enough budget for to complete. We create stories at work, but we are usually given the stories and epics that will be completed. It was a fun process and I hope to be more involved as I progress in my coding.
Third was XAML Antipatterns with Ben Dewey. Very informative! Ben showed the "Seven Deadly Sins of XAML." I hope to be able take what I learned and not commit any sins. The seven sins are:
The first session I attended was Getting Started with ASP.NET 5 with Scott Allen. I actually have taken a few courses on Pluralsight. It was nice to be able to see him and put a face to the name (although Pluralsight has pictures it isn't the same as the real life version). ASP.NET 5 has some really great features. It can be used cross platform! That seems to be a theme we have been hearing this week, Microsoft is helping developers by providing solutions, either their own or through partnerships, that allow cross platform deployment. AWESOME! Microsoft really is trying to reach out to the younger developers/generation that may not be tied to the Microsoft way of life.
We saw another awesome enhancement with ASP.NET (and I believe we saw it working with XAML the other day) and that is that you can make changes to C# code while debugging. No need to stop debugging, make the change, and then start debugging again to see if the code worked. I can't quantify how much time that will save but I know it will be a nice chunk of time. There were a few other changes that were discussed like faster performance, no csproj file needed, and more. I am excited to take a look at everything else that can be done!
Next, User Story Mapping with Philip Japikse. I don' have many notes on this session but there is a reason. Philip actually made us be social and do an activity in groups of six to eight. By group activity I mean that we all had Post It notes to develop a story of getting up in the morning until we left for work all without talking. We did it without talking so that no one person become the Alpha and took control. We had to work through the entire process of making the story and then deciding what we didn't have enough budget for to complete. We create stories at work, but we are usually given the stories and epics that will be completed. It was a fun process and I hope to be more involved as I progress in my coding.
Third was XAML Antipatterns with Ben Dewey. Very informative! Ben showed the "Seven Deadly Sins of XAML." I hope to be able take what I learned and not commit any sins. The seven sins are:
- Thou shall not us Incline Formatting. We wouldn't do it on a website, why do it on the XAML?
- Thou shall not use hard coded colors. Oh the pain if you decide to change your corporate colors and you need to go find all the places the color was used.
- Thou shall not use bitmap icons. Think about scaling and clarity.
- Thou shall not set properties manually. Less code and not code behind.
- Thou shall not duplicate chunks of XAML. Take code and move it to a user control.
- Thou shall not wrap content repeatedly. I will be honest, I didn't fully understand this one. I need to research it more.
- Thou shall not use absolute positioning. Think about window resizing and how that will impact the view. You never know how a person will be viewing your app.
Great session!
Then Brian Noyes talked about WPF MVVM in Depth. We use MVVM at work and I went to this session to help gain a better understanding of MVVM and hopefully the why behind using MVVM. I learned that some benefits are it is maintainable, testable, and extensible. I have seen all three benefits at work, but I need to spend more time in the code to fully understand how this is accomplished. Brian told us about the different responsibilities of the Model, View Model, and View. I kind of understood before, but he helped me understand better why we would want to use each. He also talked about View-First and ViewModel-First. I am not sure which one we use at work or not sure exactly how to implement one of them. More reading for me to do.
The LAST session I attended was Readable Code with John Papa. John was a very good presenter full of funny gifs and funny sayings. Beyond the funny, John presented some really gems to take back and use. Some of them we already use, but it is always good for get it reinforced. I like a little piece of wisdom that John gave us. That is essentially that we need to write bad code to make it good. We have a chance to clean it up before the review, but all code starts bad. We then need to ask "Why" to everything. If we can't answer the question of why there is probably something missing or another way to write the code.
Closing remarks were good. There was a panel of the presenters that answered questions anyone might have. It was a nice closing session and good to get more candid answer from the speakers. I hope that I get another great conference experience next year and I hope I have more coding experience when I attend. Thank you Visual Studio Live! I hope to see you next year.
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