Tristan Smith: Tech Ed 2008 Day 2

Introduction to the Entity Framework

I really felt for the speaker here, a quirky, excitable American woman. Both because it's the first session of the day with most people barely awake and also because the audience seemed semi-hostile. Hostile, I imagine, as a result of Microsoft announcement that they're effectively killing LINQ to SQL (which a lot of developers have invested time and code in) in favour of the Entity Framework (EF). As we have also invested in LINQ to SQL for our data access, this seemed like an important session for us.

We currently do a lot of code generation based on the shape of the database so we'll have to update our generation when we make the switch. While there are some obvious gains by using EF which were mentioned, I wasn't sold, the relatively few benefits over LINQ to SQL didn't seem to justify a switch.

Unfortunately the session barely skimmed the surface, no real depth was gone into.

How IT will change in the next 10 years and why you should care

Definitely my favourite session so far presented by an awesome speaker.
There were so many areas that were covered, it's hard to summarise.
Some interesting points were brought up around subjects such as the move towards virtualisation, how the green friendliness of hardware is going to have it's impact and is already.

A really interesting point was the way in which the next generation of employees are going to be the first generation of Digital Natives(DN). Here we are as Digital Immigrants, we were there before the great migration, we've been working through the change and are enjoying the gadgets but we're just not in that same headspace. The DNs of today instinctively navigate and manipulate social networks living their online identities. He pointed out that they're going to be entering the work force where they're to be stripped of their online identities, given a crappy email address and effectively disconnected. Quite a culture shock it will be for them.

The IT industry's carbon footprint is already larger than that of total global aviation. How increasing power consumption means Microsoft will dump their entire computers if a new machine has sufficient power savings. Heat is the great enemy. For the huge savings, data centres are being moved to cold places such as Greenland where there are beefy data backbones between the USA and Europe.

Introducing ASP.NET MVC

In ASP.NET Webforms, there is no master handing your pages and controls the data they need, nothing takes responsibility. The masterpage, page, controls can all have their own presentation, data access and logic.
This can make code less maintainable because you're not sure what in the hierarchy has broken. Wouldn't it be nice if you could have a clean separation of the data, logic and view? Yep! and that's what MVC is all about.
As a result of being separated out like this, your code becomes a lot more testable and you can swap out the different parts as you need.

While this sounds like the golden chalice, it takes a lot more work to make a page. There is a definite hard work tax involved, it's harder to get the same kinds of AJAX functionality that you would by just slapping an ASP.NET AJAX Update Panel around your code.

ASP.NET practices with MVC
Following up on the introduction to MVC which I was very impressed with, this session talked about some of the implementation issues and pitfalls you're likely to encounter.

Also mentioned was Unity, Microsoft's Inversion of Control offering allows you to remove the relationship reliances between layers of your code meaning when one part of your system is rewritten, providing it still matches the interface signature, it can just be swapped out.

Silverlight 2 for Mobile: Developing for Mobile Devices
Mobile development gives you a lot of functionality with a very small footprint.
Somewhere it falls far short of windows and web development is when it comes to graphics. Generally the trade off of using the compact framework is dull looking forms, text and interactivity. While you can do pretty graphics, the work required renders it generally unfeasible.

Silverlight mobile looks to change all that, giving you the full Silverlight experience you'd get on the desktop with all the same awesome animation, vector graphics and interactivty.
For situations where you have a Silverlight website, you can have the mobile get a different experience by checking the type of device requesting the page and redirecting to different content. With Nokia as well as Windows Mobile phones supporting Silverlight, it's a really good way of standing out from the crowd.

Neil Bostrom: Microsoft TechEd (Tuesday)

ASP.NET AJAX
Previously known as "Atlas", this is Microsoft's open source implementation of AJAX. When I say open source, the client scripting is open source and is compatible with all major current browsers (IE, Firefox, Netscape and Safari - even on the Mac). This client scripting is being developed by the community in an open source fashion.

Server side scripting for this technology is Microsoft's usual closed source but is only compatible with ASP.NET so no real reason to make it open source. A lot of the server side work is drag-and-drop; you can change most of your existing code to start using the power of AJAX (when appropriate).

Neat features with this AJAX framework are that it will plug straight into existing web services. and has bridging code to allowing AJAX script to seamlessly call current web services.

SQL Server 2005: Advanced Indexing Strategies
All of this session made me see that I need to learn a lot more about sql server! and soon!

Summary of this session was try to always have a clustered index of your standard tables. Try to make the clustered index narrow (limited fields), unique (identity field, datetime / identity or GUID) and small (Identity). Sometimes the best non clustered indexes are the ones that cover a lot of fields. This gives the sql optimizer a bunch more options.

Kimberly Tripp knows her stuff and is incredibly passionate about SQL server and all it entails. She has made a bunch of online webcasts discussing almost every aspect of sql server and getting the most out of it. As soon as I get back to the office I will be downloading them all!

Language Integrated Query (LINQ) Framework
I personally believe this is the best thing to come out of TechEd: It's Gentle.NET on steroids backed by Microsoft. It's a well thought through framework for querying almost anything inside .NET. Objects in memory, you want to filter them? Job done. Sort, group, aggregate? Job done. You want to do all that with data from sql server? Job done. You want to all that with xml document / web services? Job done.

I believe this will fundamentally change how I write my code and I'm picking up a copy as soon as I can!

Visual C# IDE Tips and Tricks
Class Diagrams - You can drag framework classes into the class diagrams to explore them in more detail
Refactoring - All the refactoring in C# is code snippet based, meaning you can change the refactoring to suit your needs
Debugging - You can control more closely what is debugged and how it's displayed using the Debugger attributes available in the framework