Another long day crammed with useful and exciting stuff-
Keynote: Visual Studio - Looking Into the Future
Pretty exciting preview of the next version of Visual Studio "15" (different than Visual Studio 2015) and Xamarin. Very exciting mobile story! And most amazing that a big muckety muck at Microsoft did his presentation on a MacBook! Times are a changing.Developer Productivity in Visual Studio 2015
Unfortunately, the first breakout session of the day was a bit of a disappointment. In hindsight I wish I attended the session on ASP.NET Core 1.0 in this time slot. Not a total loss though. There are some things about VS2015 that are very compelling, like Diagnostic Tools. Pretty cool to have real-time information about CPU and memory utilization while in debug mode. Conditional break points and auto-generated unit test (Intellitest) look very interesting as well. Really looking forward to upgrading- my current project uses VS2013.End-to-End Dependency Injection & Writing Testable Software
Lots of great sessions in this time slot and I chose this one. Great choice! Miguel Castro is a fantastic presenter! Highly recommend hearing him speak if you ever get the chance. In spite of his gruff New Jersey demeanor he's actually very friendly and I've had a few enjoyable chats with him between sessions. And of course the topic is of great relevance to me and I took away a lot!My current project at work is the first one that has embraced unit testing in a big way. I won't say we're going it wrong, but we're definitely doing it the hard way! Using Dependency Injection is way easier than manually creating mock model objects for every model object for every testing scenario as we have been doing it. DI is a much better way to go and I have some work to do when I get back to the office. Fortunately there is another session today (Thursday) that focuses on DI.
General Session: JavaScript and the Rise of the New Virtual Machine
Scott Hanselman was the second general session presenter of the day. As a long time listener of his Hanselminutes podcast it was a real treat to see him speak in person. Really inspired to learn ES6! Unfortunately too many other things to learn first.
Big Data and Hadoop with Azure HDInsight
My motivation for attending this session is an application I inherited at work. It's simply a tool that aggregates massive amounts of financial data and makes it available for queries and reports. There are no transactions. The data is only updated once every quarter. And the system is slow as molasses. So it's would be an ideal candidate for conversion to some sort of big data/data warehouse solution.
Hadoop is a big data processing tool and it was neat to learn how it worked. Unfortunately it has a pretty steep learning curve and the solution presented (HDInsight) appears to be a cloud-only solution. We're a completely on-prem shop and will be for the foreseeable future. So I probably won't be able to play in this space anytime soon.
Hadoop is a big data processing tool and it was neat to learn how it worked. Unfortunately it has a pretty steep learning curve and the solution presented (HDInsight) appears to be a cloud-only solution. We're a completely on-prem shop and will be for the foreseeable future. So I probably won't be able to play in this space anytime soon.
Go Mobile with C#, Visual Studio, and Xamarin
Fantastic session! James Montemagno was another fantastic inspirational speaker and gave a great presentation about using Xamarin Forms in VS2015 to develop mobile apps. Live on stage he wrote an app in XAML and C# using the Xamarin Plugin for Visual Studio 2015 and built/deployed it to both a Android and iOS simulators, and ran it successfully. It was even able to access native resources like the camera and GPS. He was even able to set break points in his code and debug on the simulators. Very exciting and inspiring to me that I can build mobile apps with my existing skill set. Totally want to download VS2015 and get my code on!
