Monday was a wet and windy day. It was a day of all-day workshops, and I elected to get all the WPF done at once. Dave Wheeler gave an excellent presentation.
Interesting that desktop is far more entrenched than Silverlight, for a couple of reasons: firstly it has been out and stable for longer, and secondly that it has an niche (advanced or scalable desktop Windows user interfaces) for which there is no competitor, whereas Silverlight's is competing with flash and a lot of flavours of AJAX.
I came out with a much better overview of WCF. And more desire to use it.
Tuesday
Tuesday was a sunny day, and the conference had moved to the bottom levels of the Barbican. And grown much larger, with far more people, and vendor booths. The barbican is wonderful, huge labyrinth. This is the first year that the conference is in this larger venue. I got a few pieces of swag.
Excluding the staff, the gender ratio must have been about 50 male to 1 female.
David Wheeler gave the keynote speech, on Rich Internet Applications.
New tools since last DevWeek:
VS 2008 AJAX
Silverlight 1
On the way now:
ASP.NET – MVC, Data services
WPF Enhancements
Entity framework
We are looking at Software in the cloud
Social networking -> social change
Rich applications are driven by media and conversations.
And we have to monetise the web - it has to pay for itself, by search placement and ads.
What is a RIA?
- data driven
- secure
- good performance
- Runs connected
- Engaging
Trade off Reach vs. richness.
HTML has the widest reach, least richness,
AJAX can be used for RIA with wider reach
Silverlight for RIA with slightly less reach, more richness
WinForms for richer, less reach. Not a RIA anymore.
WPF-> most richness, least reach.
The compelling thing about Silverlight is not flash developers using Silverlight, it is C# developers using Silverlight. There are a lot more C# developers. They can use existing skills. Unlike flash, can interact with the dev.
NBC Olympics will be a big stress test of SilverLight.
Then I was on on to track 2, in Cinema 3, Floor 4 for 10 ways to improve your code, Neal Ford, Thoughtworks. It was a good session, mostly ideas not code, but not dry. Ask me about the angry moneys some time. I should print out a "YAGNI" sign some time.
Daniel Moth gave us a tour of VS2008, and Alex Homer gave a session on the Enterprise Application block. It's not the most glamourous code, but it works very well. We use it, maybe should use it more. Version 4 is apparently out soon, and will include a Dependency Injection block.