Keeping a log of the technical topics I am learning. These days those topics are centered around DeFi and Solidity programming. Absolutely not financial advice.
I’m impressed with the live streaming video system that Microsoft set-up for the PDC.
You can watch live or past sessions. I’m watching the keynote right now that took place just a few hours ago.
The player lets you switch between slide view and stage view.
I wish they did that for the previous TechEd events… Too bad the Ipad doesn’t do Silverlight.
Update: when the US sleeps (now 07:54 BST), quality switches to HD, see below:
The DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper event at the Microsoft offices in Reading was split in two tracks of simultaneous sessions.
Notes from some of the sessions:
It’s Time to Look at Entity Framework
Speaker: Julie Lerman (twitter @julielerman) thedatafarm.com
The Entity Framework was initially designed to reverse engineer existing databases but you can now also create them from scratch.
The designer generates a DDL. It doesn’t actually create the DB, it creates a script. Then you give the script to a DBA (Not sure how you specify paths for database and log files ?).
Support for POCO classes: your classes don’t have to inherit from Entity Framework classes, you can keep your model totally separate from EF and still work with the designer. The way you do this is through T4 templates, some of them you can download from Visual Studio Gallery.
If you tweak the T4 template you can totally abstract the EF layer (ObjectSet, etc…). In other words your code can interact with EF only through interfaces, which makes unit-testing possible.
TODO:
Packaging in the .NET World
Speaker: Seb Lambla (twitter @serialseb)
Seb demoed OpenWrap www.openwrap.org (the site is going live live in a few days), a packaging tool that you use to inject dependencies into your build. The dependencies must be available as “wraps” for this to be possible. You inject the dependencies with a simple command-line tool.
The openwrap commands can also be used from within an msbuild file.
There is another open source tool called Nupack (maintained by Microsoft) released on codeplex.
TODO:
Is NoSQL the Future of Data Storage?
Speaker: Gary Short (twitter @garyshort)
TODO:
Modern C#: this is not your grand-daddy’s language
Speaker: Jon Skeet and his pony. (twitter: @jonskeet)
Inspiring talk about the evolution of the language features of C#.
Jon illustrated how powerful C# has got by writing a MaxBy() implementation in various versions of C#. MaxBy() should return the element of a collection containing the maximum value of a specified field. It should work with any field and any collection.
He wrote the solution in C# 4 use generics, lambdas, method extensions and inferred types.
In C# 1.0, he started with a simple for loop: this lead to code specific to the class being compared. To make the code a bit more generic he used a delegate and some downcasting from System.Object to the type compared: it worked but was somewhat verbose and not as type safe as the C# 4 version.
Jon’s quotes:
“Knowing how things work under the hood is important. However you need to be able to shift gears so that you think at a higher level when you need to”
“We need to be jolted out of the idea of what a language should look like.”
“You can express yourself more clearly without having to write things you don’t need. What needs to be expressed is expressed only once.”
“Learning F# helps you understand the new features of C# 4.”
Things you should know about SQL as a developer
Speaker: Simon Sabin (twitter: @simon_sabin)
TODO:
More blog posts about the event:
Slides:
IPad
Very well suited to the Ipad, here is a typical use case:
Unlike Reeder, this one will show the pictures included in the RSS feeds.
You can create tabs to arrange your feeds. Inside each tab you can add feeds imported from Google Reader. Note you can only import from Google Reader, it does not sync.
Pleasant to look at but from a functional point of view, Reeder is still better because it syncs with any change you make to your subscriptions in Google Reader.
There is a small set of files I always want to have with me. I use DropBox to keep them in sync. I installed it on my PC, 2 laptops, an Iphone and an Ipad. Changes made on any device are immediately propagated to the others if they’re on.
The Windows version gives a version history of each file.
IPhone
Clever little app for TODOs. You can associate a TODO with a geographical location. Click the nearby button to filter TODOs by current location. This is good for the situations where you say “Next time I go to Boots, I should get some shampoo”. Elegant, fast, good-looking.
I use it to look-up the films available in a short list of of favorite cinemas.
It’s all I wanted to do with Google maps: see a place I like, make a note of it to come back later or go to a place and leave a note about it. I used to do it with Google maps, it’s much more clever with FourSquare.
A friend talks to you about this new restaurant he tried: look-up the name, add it as todo and attach a tip “Remi recommended the Savoy bar because it was recently refurbished and just re-opened”
A number of little apps are available to make it easier to use FourSquare, in particular to automate the check-ins: CheckMate and FourMinder.
I use it to look-up the films available within my short list of favorite London cinemas.
The Iphone version allows you to cache some of the files for offline view (by making them favorites). You can’t view the version history though.
I’ll go hear about Windows Phone 7 and Azure on Tuesday. It will happen at the ICC in the Docklands (Royal Victoria Dock).
It seems it’s still possible to register.
