Vince Bullinger

VS Live Conference: Day Two

Day two of the VS Live conference is over, as is another day of lectures.  Again, I attended a lot of lectures on WPF and Silverlight all day.  In the evening, though, I sat in on a lecture on the new .Net MVC Framework.  I was interested in seeing what they did with the MVC concept I learned about back in college.

Today's lectures were given under the assumption that no one was a complete newb.  There was a keynote in the morning by Mary Jo Foley, author of a book about the post Gates-era Microsoft.  We talked about anything from when she was able to interview Bill Gates back when Microsoft was much smaller to Google Chrome.

Today, I attended the following lectures:

http://vslive.com/2008/newyork/rich_clients.aspx#vt2 - Silverlight and Expression from a developer's point of view
http://vslive.com/2008/newyork/rich_clients.aspx#vt6 - Making your line-of-business applications look pretty using Silverlight
http://vslive.com/2008/newyork/rich_clients.aspx#vt10 - Determining when to use AJAX or Silverlight instead of normal .Net
http://vslive.com/2008/newyork/rich_clients.aspx#vt14 - How to turn your Silverlight code into a user control and use it in other places in the application
http://vslive.com/2008/newyork/services_mashups.aspx#vt18 - Silverlight with SOA
http://vslive.com/2008/newyork/night_sessions.aspx#ASP - ASP.Net MVC

Most of the lectures I attended were kind of unimportant looks at different case studies (usually made up).  Nothing too fantastic, but it was good to get more exposure and more looks at the technologies from different angles.  It was nice to see Silverlight code turned into controls, though, and Rocky Lhotka's talk on Silverlight and SOA was very good.  Rocky is a local - he works at Magenic - and the talk went over some good things to consider, best practices, etc.  But the most important thing to think about is that, if you want a serious application and you're using Silverlight, you almost undoubtedly will be using some services.  More than likely, you'll have to write them.

Since Silverlight is meant to operate on the client and not the server, you'll need some asynchronous calls to web services to get anything done.  We went over a simple service, a simple Silverlight app (can't even remember what it did) and some things to think about and tips, etc.  For example, if you want to re-use code, you have some things to think about:

Since we're talking Silverlight here, you obviously can't use much of the .Net framework.  That means that if you build a massive application, your Silverlight project can NOT use it.  Directly, anyway.  It can't reference your other projects: it can only use other Silverlight projects.  And the rest of your application can NOT use any of your Silverlight projects.  He did show us a couple of tricks to re-use a little bit: write code that can be used by both projects in the Silverlight app and reference the individual file as a link in the service project.  Make it a partial class.  In each of the projects, finish off the partial class with the Silverlight or .Net specifics in a different file.

The rest of any kind of work should be done with services, and is something that needs to be considered when working with Silverlight.

One more day of lectures in New York and then it'll be a day of sightseeing and respect-paying.

Ben is totally AWOL.  I think he's too excited to be in the city and had to get out :)

We're planning on going to an authentic New York pizza parlor tomorrow, though.

VS Live Conference: Day One

Well, the first day of the VS Live conference has finished, and Ben and I have been in lectures all day.  Ben was sitting in on lectures on LINQ and similar topics all day, I believe.  Haven't touched base with him since the lectures ended, though, so I don't know how it's been going for him.

I spent the day listening in on some pretty fun lectures.  WPF and Silverlight have been the main topics, and there are enough of those to last me through tomorrow, too.

The first lecture wsa kind of a 101 on WPF, which was good because I've never really rolled my sleeves up and worked with it before.  I've just seen some introductions.  The next two I attended were presented by the same guy, a Microsoft MVP who is the president of Oak Leaf Enterprises - http://www.oakleafsd.com/ - and were a little more in-depth.  He re-created the iPhone's interface using WPF.  It obviously didn't quite pull up the same operations that the iPhone does, but it did behave in a very similar manner and looked almost identical.  And the cell phone bars were solely a mock up :)

The last couple of lectures were a cross between WPF and Silverlight.  We learned a lot about how to minimize code and how to be more productive with your XAML, as well as how to do some pretty fancy data binding stuff.

The biggest thing I've found out is that this is not just some fad or some kind of *other* way to do things: this is it.  WPF and its ilk are the future.  Truly.  I'm not saying that in a gimmicky way.  I never do that.  I say what I mean and I mean what I say.  Microsoft has literally dead-ended Windows Forms.  There will be no major enhancements for the Windows Forms technologies: WPF is the way to go.  WPF is also very easily converted from a Windows application to a web application.  This is not the case with normal Windows Forms and Windows Web Applications as it stands today.

And I, for one, welcome our new development technology overlords.  As the internet meme goes.

Designers can learn XAML, in my opinion, or at least the ones worth keeping around.  Also, we developers can have a much easier time developing richer, better looking applications.  This will really help (expression) blend the two categories of coding.  That (terrible) pun does make me wonder about the future of Microsoft Expression Blend and Microsoft Visual Studio.  I find it very strange to keep the two separate.  Maybe they could be offerred separately, so that the costs of either one could stay down, if you didn't need the other, but I'd prefer a package deal that wasn't too outrageously expensive, myself.

I'll be getting some other things in tomorrow and Wednesday, but today was all WPF, XAML and Silverlight.  I'll check in again tomorrow, with more information on the aformentioned technologies, plus a .Net MVC Framework lecture I'll be attending, as well.

I'll be keeping tabs on my non-VS Live dealings here in New York on my MySpace blog if you are privvy to it (meh, it's public, anyone can look it up) if you care to hear about my non-professional goings-on.