DevIntersection - Day 3

Today was the first day of the sessions at DevIntersection. It started with a keynote session by Scott Guthrie of Microsoft. The title of the talk was "Movile-first, Cloud-first Development." It was a good speech by Scott. I always feel the keynotes are more about a quick glance of what the speakers can do without much team to show you what was done. I guess it leaves questions and will have you go experiment more on your own. Microsoft is coming out with some great products and I will definitely look at more information on the Microsoft products.

Then the sessions began. The first session I attended was Understanding the Windows Desktop App Development Landscape by Brian Noyes. The first topic, the mortality of the different UI frameworks. The question when looking at the frameworks that we need to ask is, what do we consider dead vs. matured. The different frameworks may be at different stages in their lives. The frameworks we currently have:

• Windows Forms - Many will think that windows forms are dead. There are many projects that are built on Windows Forms and should not just be dropped due to thinking Windows Forms are dead, just mature. Forms are just mature. However, Brian would not start a new project using Windows Forms.
• Silverlight - This also not dead...yet. The browsers are the ones that are killing Silverlight. It is not yet yet, but it is in the trauma unit on life support. Definitely do not start a new project using Silverlight.
• Windows Phone - Bloodied on the battlefield. Survival: questionable. Only time will tell.
• WPF, UWP, Xamarin, Single Page apps are all alive and well.

WPF is mature, it has been around for almost a decade. In computer time this should be gone. However, it still lives on and probably will for a long time to come. There are many features WPF that are great. Some of them:

• Data binding validation
• Implicit Data Templates
• Dynamic Resources
• Custom MarkupExtensions 
• Multi-Bindings
• and more!

UWP allows you to develop for many different platforms, like the desktop, mobile, and XBox. Great for touch, pen, or keyboard/mouse. UWP provides a better app security and provides isolation from other apps on a computer. You are able to sell these apps in the Windows Store. Great features available such as:

• Cortana integration
• Low power consumption
• Ability to move apps into UWP using wrappers

Xamarin is a great crossplatform tool using C#. You can write an app and share it across platforms including iOS and Android. The logic code can be reused across platforms and only UI will have to be written for each platform you would like to include for your app. Finally! Windows can develop for iOS (although to develop for iOS you still are required to have an Apple computer).

Single Page apps are cross platform are well. All they require is a browser. This can be written in HTML, CSS, or Javascript (hey! My workshops were about typescript and Angular 2 which compile into JavaScript!). The single page apps can use the same architectural patterns as a well designed XAML desktop app, just using different syntax. With a responsive design you can create an app that will work on desktop and on mobile web browsers beautifully, or at least sufficiently.

The next session I attended was How to Be a Good Community Member by Contributing to OSS with Brian Clark. Apparently, I like the sessions by the Brians. Throughout college I was involved in the community and did many hours of community service. Open source allows companies to use their products/frameworks for free. Why would anyone want to do this? They probably build something they needed to solve a problem and sent it out into the world for consumption. Should companies pay to use open source? Maybe the payment should come in the form of allowing employees to contribute on work time (my own thought, not own that Brian brought up).

Well there wasn't much I didn't already know or think in this session. It actually was a shorter session and we got out a little early. I think the main take-away from this session was the resources for doing your first contribution to Open Source. Below are some resources shared:

• github.com/code52 - starts a one week project that is easy to jump into at any point
• upforgrabs.net -
• firsttimersonly.com - aggregate certain projects
• yourfirstpr.github.io
• issuehub.io - allows you to focus on the language you are looking for
• github.com/mungell/awesome-for-beginners

Things to think about before starting on an Open Source project: the process for the project, the rules, what are the guidelines of the project, is there a code of conduce, can you run the project locally, is it in a language you are familiar (maybe you don't want to stretch on your first pull request), and more.

Really, think about the project and find one that fits for you to contribute. Communicate with the team and make sure they know who you are and what you are doing. And, start simple to get your name out there to allow people to see you can be trusted and you do work well with others.

My third session was Create an Angular 2 app from Scratch with Dan Wahlin and John Papa. I probably should have skipped this session. It was much like the workshop I did on Tuesday. I hoped that they would start from a blank sheet and add everything we needed. Well, they started with a project that already had the needed files for an Angular 2 app to start working. In fact, they already had a page, Hello World that would pull up. I stayed to see if any new information would be given. There was no new information and I was disappointed. Still Dan and John did a good job.

The final session I went to was Automatic UI generation in .NET by Mark Miller. Mark is a great presenter and had a lot of, shall we say, love for UI. There was a lot of code that Mark had done before the session. He then went through what the code he put in before did, and showed the code a little bit. The dynamic response of the UI is pretty cool and what showed was dependent on what you clicked and the properties on the UI. It was nice to see, I just wish he would have gone more into the code of how to build the responsive UI. 

Onto the sessions for tomorrow. I hope I pick a good set of sessions.