Showing posts with label Austin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Austin. Show all posts

Saturday, May 21, 2016

Visual Studio Live! Austin - Day 3 (Wednesday 5/18/2016)

If I ever attend another conference like this I'll blog about it the same day.  It was a lot of information to take in over 4 days and some details are getting lost in the fog.

Angular 2 101

Deborah Kurata, Ms. Angular herself, led off today to a packed house.   Again it was really cool to see in person someone I have been reading about in blogs and hearing about in podcasts for a while.  Angular 2 is meant to be smaller, lighter and faster than Angular 1, and appeared to be in the demos (hopefully in real life as well).  Works with a variety of languages- ES5 and 6 (of interest to me because they are similar to C#), TypeScript, and Dart (which I had never heard of).

Hack Proofing Your Modern Web Applications

Another great session that will be useful immediately.  Not going to say too much until after we, uh, check on some things at work  ;)   The presenter, Adam Tuliper, went over the common attacks, SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting, etc. and how the bad guys are using them in today's mobile-enabled world.

General Session: Coding, Composition, and Combinatorics

Billy Hollis is another speaker I was familiar with through podcast interviews, Channel 9, and PluralSight.  He's another fantastic presenter that was a real treat to see in person.He basically challenged all the coders in the room (basically everyone) to think more about design and solving problems in a logical way rather than "throwing code" at problems.  IE. Compose screens that "just work" (from user's job point of view).  Easier said than done for folks like me.  ;)

AngularJS & ASP.NET MVC Playing Nice

Another excellent presentation by Miguel Castro- how to use Angular 1 and MVC in the same app.  Essentially each MVC "page" contains an Angular "s.p.a.".  I can't think of any business cases where we would need to do this at work, but it's nice to know it's possible, albeit messy- especially the routing.  If I remember correctly, by default MVC routing will take precedence over Angular routing.

Angular 2 Forms and Validation

Deborah Kurata presented.  She along with John Papa seem to be the foremost authorities in Angular 2.  The templating story looks really cool, but she made it pretty clear that it's not written in stone yet.    Unfortunately I won't have time to dig into this anytime soon.  Too many other things I need to focus on- XAML, WPF, MVVM, EF6, unit testing, modern design, Dependency Injection...

Acceptance Testing in Visual Studio 2015

Unfortunately this day last session of the day was a disappointment.  Should have gone to ES6 session instead.  About five minutes of the talk was devoted to unit testing, which was useful.  But the rest was very Agile/Scrum-oriented which is not how we do development at work, and tools and services that we don't have with our version of Visual Studio and MS Enterprise License.  I spent most of the session catching up on work and email.

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Megabus Review

Last week the kids were on spring break so we went to San Antonio for a few days by Megabus.  It was our first time on one.

Good

What's not to like about a double-decker bus?  The seats were equivalent to economy class on a US airline.  We paid extra for the 'premium' seats on the top deck towards the front, which have a little extra leg room, small tables, and electrical outlets.  Even paying for 'premium' seats for all four of us both ways the total was about $70.  The bus had Wifi, but most streaming services like YouTube, Netflix, and Pandora were blocked.

The San Antonio "bus stop" (see below) was convenient for us, about 4 blocks from our hotel on the Riverwalk.  There is easy city bus access from there to all the "touristy" stuff like The Zoo, Sea World, Fiesta Texas, The Pearl Brewery Art Museum, etc.

Not So Good

The "bus stops" are actually parking lots.  In Austin this wasn't a big deal because it was next to Dobie Mall and therefore access to food and bathrooms.  There was also a gate agent-type person and a security guard.  However in San Antonio there was nothing but a parking lot in the middle of an industrial area.

Overall

We'll probably ride it again the next time we go to San Antonio.  The kids liked it and it sure beats driving on I-35 in rush hour and parking downtown.