Keynote
Scott Hanselman started out the day with his keynote, Information Overload: Scaling Yourself. As usual, Scott brought it. Spoiler: Twitter has little productive value.
Morning Session
For the morning session I checked out Jon Galloway‘s talk on using the various frameworks inside of ASP.NET (MVC, Web API, *shudder* Webforms) together. I’ll link to his materials when they’re out, but short story: MVC 4 is dropping today and Visual Studio 2012 makes this much easier (also dropping today for MSDN people). It makes it possible to not only use the two together, but finally gives an easy ‘upgrade’ path from Webforms to MVC.
Afternoon Session I
I was fortunate enough to catch Leon Gersing‘s talk on Truth and Myths of Software Development. In his talk, he went into the various myths and truths that he’s encountered, such as TDD being a silver bullet (myth), or that Agile is still alive (myth). As someone who works at a company that practices Agile development, this rocked my world:
I won’t attempt to mangle the great talk he gave by summarizing it here, but needless to say if you have a chance to see him talk, go. His talks alone are worth the price of admission.
Afternoon Session II
Jason Bock‘s talk on Roslyn filled up the mid-afternoon speaking time, and he filled his talk with really neat examples, like how to use Roslyn to remove regions in code.
As someone who hates regions with a passion, I salute his efforts.
Roslyn is still only a CTP, but the number of things that can be done with it are mind boggling. Imagine being able to have your code automatically sort properties and methods alphabetically? Or have custom warnings based on internal code standards?
Afternoon Session III
The final session of the afternoon was Html5 Game Development with JQuery with Burke Holland. He built, from scratch, Pong in front of a live studio audience. He’s putting up the code later this week on his Github account. Even better is that he used CoffeeScript and Node.js’s Jitter to transpile the CoffeeScript into JavaScript for us, so we could see the awesomeness of CoffeeScript (this may actually get me to use JavaScript more often).
The evening closed out with a Pig Roast, a Groupon sponsored waterpark party, and lots of fun. The sort of things you’d have to be here for. But, in keeping with my earlier promise, here is a drink that sums up the evening (iPhone included for scale):
