Time flies – the Øredev week is already over and I’m back at the office. The conference was really great. Reaching above my expectations. It was of course great to learn a lot of new stuff, but what I think was the best part about the conference is that it gives you a lot of inspiration to create applications, try out new things and walk that extra mile to make your application more maintainable and tested.
The sessions were divided in different areas, e.g. .NET, web development, agile and smart phones. It was never hard to find a session I wanted to go to. I, however, recommend to create your own schedule beforehand as it’s really handy to have with you when you’re at the conference running between sessions.
During the sessions I tried to write notes about the things I found most interesting, but it was hard to keep up with both listening and taking notes. Following is notes I wrote down from some of the sessions I attended.
Patterns for Building Internal DSL's in C# 3.0
In this session Jeremy D. Miller talked about Fluent Interfaces which are handy in certain APIs, like a Twitter client API.
When creating such interfaces you should think about:
- Don’t try to make everything grammatically correct. Small and tidy method names are better and easier to understand.
- You should limit the possible choices in the API to guide user to the right methods. This can be done by using Interfaces instead of returning the same object over and over again.
- You should keep the chaining within 3 chain calls.
Better Practices for Building Fast Web Apps
This was quite an interesting talk as it covered lots of tools I hadn’t heard of before. Giorgio Sardo mention tools you can use to increase the performance of your sites. Like using sprites, finding out not used CSS styles and a tool called Doloto that converts your existing scripts to be lazy loaded instead.
The tip I liked especially much was when he mention about a new API called Web Timing API that browsers are starting to implement. It can be used to find lots of details about how fast your site has loaded. I knew about this API before the talk, but what caught my attention was when gave the smart tip of actually sending this data (serialized JavaScript object) to the server to get free profiling information from your users. How cool isn’t that!
//IE
window.msPerfomance
//Webkit
window.webkitPerformance
CSS3
Jonathan Snook talked about all the new fun things in CSS3, like animations, transitions, border-radius and shadows of all kind, etc. He also went through all different browsers and what they currently support.
Until CSS3 is ready it has to go through these states: Working Draft, Last Call, Candidate Recommendation, Proposed Recommendation and finally Recommendation. Note that each module in CSS3 has its own state, and not one all together. You can see in which state each module is in at the W3C site.
Good links shared by Snook:
ASP.NET MVC 3
A few days before the conference Scott Gu (and all other the bloggers) announced that ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Candidate was released. This is great news as it means there is only bug-fixing left before we get the final version. Brad Wilson had this talk and he did it great! He talked about the new Razor syntax, the new package manager NuGet and some new features in MVC 3.
- Partial caching in child actions.
- Unobtrusive JavaScript validation.
- Razor syntax highlighting in Visual Studio.
- A way to turn of session for a controller (
[ControllerSessionState()]). - And lots more…
“Abusing C#” and “C#'s Greatest Mistakes”
These two talks was given by Jon Skeet, the man, the myth, the legend in C#. It was a really interesting talk covering lots of different ways to hack around in C# in ways you maybe shouldn’t do in production mode.
The two talks were very similar in the way they were presented. They both had no slides and only covered Skeet going through examples of areas the audience wanted to learn more about. It really felt like we could fill a whole conference with only Jon Skeet talking about C# (I would totally go on it).
Now I’m eagerly waiting for Øredev to publish the videos of all the other sessions I didn’t attend to. It seems they will be published on
Vimeo. Read more details about the other sessions at my colleague’s blog
Dileno. See you at the next Øredev!
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I have been working a lot with upgrading assemblies to newer versions and debugging why things does not work. When doing this you often have to check which version you currently have in your “bin” folder. This takes quite a lot of time as you have to check properties of each file (or hover of the file and wait for the tooltip) to see the assembly version. It is hard to get a quick glance over all your dll versions.
Andreas is a web developer who likes to create great things with ASP.NET MVC, jQuery and Chrome Extensions. 