A week have past since the last day of Øredev 2009. Dotway has representatives in the program committee, working with the .NET track among other tracks, so I thought a wrap-up post from that perspective would be in place. As usual the track is home for many different topics from the .NET stack. In this post I’ll try give an overview on what went on.
As a clarification, Øredev is all about plurality, both in technology and process. In my mind, this is one of the biggest strengths of the conference.
ASP.NET
This year Levi Broderick from the ASP.NET MVC team talked about news in Web Forms and Dynamic Data 4.0. He showed us how to use dynamic data features in Web Forms projects using some new extensions for 4.0 among other things.
K. Scott Allen had a great talk about an empty folder and Scott Hanselman had a session about great ninja moves, all in ASP.NET MVC. So all pillars of ASP.NET were covered.
Something that was mentioned in nearly every talk was validation through meta data, used by both ASP.NET MVC and Dynamic Data. Some cool stuff around validation could be done! Check the following post for a great summary Customizing ASP.NET MVC 2 - Metadata and Validation.
Queen of debugging Tess Fernandez talked about ASP.NET debugging, but she also had a lot of other things going on at the conference. Check her recap for videos and podcasts from Øredev.
Richard Campbell of the .NET Rocks fame told us about how to get big ASP.NET sites performant. This talk made me think of an old famous Swedish jingle “every 20 seconds”, that now easily could be be used as “every 90 seconds”. This you should hum when working with caching.
In summary, a great blend for the ASP.NET developers. And remember you could always play with the latest ASP.NET bits via ASP.NET on Codeplex.
Data
Strange topic, but hopefully you’ll get what I mean as we go along. Stephen Bohlen talked about NHibernate extensions and Julie Lerman about the new version of Entity framework, that now allows us working in an agile manner, something that was shown in her session. Julie also talked about data access in the cloud (Azure), this from a developer perspective. She shared her experience when starting to learn about Azure and the options for storing data. Over at the Cloud track, hosted by Dotway’s own Magnus Mårtensson, Microsoft Sweden’s Johan Lindfors also spoke on the Azure subject, in a bigger picture but also touching the subject of data access.
Alan Smith too talked about Azure and how developers can take advantage of cloud computing. He also did some great five question interviews. Be sure to check out Alan Smith’s cloudcasts.
You could also read Julie's wrap-up and Stephen's wrap-up of Øredev.
WPF / Silverlight & UX
The first day of sessions started of with Eric Stollnitz showcasing some of what’s been going on over at Microsoft Research on the UX track. Over at the .NET track, Shawn Wildermuth showed of the news in Silverlight 3. We also had Karsten Januszewski from the Visit Mix team, who talked about that developers and designers should work together and shared some secrets on luring the designer to the Expression Suite. Blend 3 enables better ways of working together. A pamphlet called “The New Iteration” was handed out so we could dig deeper into the subject. And last but not least we had Bea Stollnitz showing us some neat tricks and new useful features of WPF 4 and Silverlight on the topic of visualization.
Other
We learned Productive WCF by Juval Löwy. He shared some real good WCF nuggets on tracing/debugging among other things and the attendees scribbled away in their pads like never before.
If this were a fisherman's tale, I would start with “the sea was angry that day”, but it’s not, so I start with “the demo gods were angry that day” — something Shawn Wildermuth experienced while demoing Oslo. But he handled it gracefully and I learned. The demo struggling gave us some insight in working with Oslo as well.
Oren Eini didn’t talk about NHibernate this time. His session was about breaking out of dependency hell and infrastructure. He also tried to get the Swedish crowd more interactive. A tough task, but a great plan! Keep it up Oren!
Julia Lerman and Oren got together to talk about profiling Entity Framework, check out EFProf on Oren’s blog
K. Scott Allen had a good session, with great pace, explaining the inner workings of LINQ. The crowd seamed very pleased with this introduction.
Out in the expedition hall, the crowd gathered around the Microsoft Surface board in Microsoft’s booth. You could get your hands on your very own if you take home the price of the competition over at http://www.mobilethisdeveloper.com.
Scott Hanselman also thought us how to manage the growing every day flow of information. This was in the Friday morning keynote. Later the same day he and Oren Eini joined a panel debate. Head over and watch the panel debate.
Summary
As I mentioned in the beginning, Øredev is a cross platform/process conference with a broad perspective. In this post, I have solely focused on the .NET track and associated speakers. If you want another view that more covers the Øredev experience in full, read this post.
That’s a wrap! Hope to see you at next years Øredev.