UKTechDays 2011
Date: Monday, 23 May 2011
Location: Fulham, London
I attended 2 sessions under cloud topic and all the sessions except from the very first one (and a half!) under The Web topic.
For me, the important highlight of the event was to see presenters from outside Microsoft being invited. For Instance, Bruce Lawson Opera evangelist did a 60 minutes presentation on HTML5. Also a weird thing on Azure topic was the amount of marketing material which was stuffed into it; with three companies showcasing their Azure-Based products in length within the first session.
Highlights on the Azure Sessions:
ü A-Z of the Windows Azure Platform by David Gristwood
· Something to have some reading about:
· SQL Azure: Extending SQL server for relational storage for the cloud.
o Blob, Table and Queue types new for Windows Azure
· Azure AppFabric : Infrastructure to connect to the cloud that
o Connects existing app to the cloud
o Connects through network boundaries
o Easily control authorization to apps
Highlights on the Web sessions:
ü HTML5 - Who, what, when, why? By Bruce Lawson (@brucel)
· Very cool features of HTML5
ü Web development with HTML5 & Internet Explorer By Martin Beeby (@thebeebs)
· Yes! The same guy who presented on MVC at LBi for the second EPiServer meetup!
· Demo of using html5 video and audio, IE9 canvas and JQuery
· Also jquery.svg.js was recommended: a useful JS library that wraps the SVG and coding SVG is much easier using it.
· Raphael for Graphs
· Also some cool tools recommended:
o Modernizer: feature detection library for advanced browser features
o Mire video converter: For converting video types to each other
ü Enhancing sites with Pinning and Internet Explorer by Stephen Kennedy
· On IE9 feature that enables your websites to be pinned on taskbar or start menu
· Details of what classes, methods and properties to be used. (Too much details I would say)
· For more code/demo on pinning enabled sites: http://buildmypinnedsite.com/
ü An introduction to CSS3 for web developers by Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew)
· Some of the css 3 features
ü Getting Tech.Days online by Martin Beeby
· On how MS guys developed the techdays website using Umraco cms and hosted on Windows azure.
· Surprisingly Umraco CMS been promoted and Highly recommended on a Microsoft event
ü Getting Productive with ASP.NET MVC v3 (@Stevensanderson)
· Vary useful and informative presentation by Steve Sanderson from Microsoft
· With code demo of 6 items to get the most out of MVC 3
o NuGet: Package Managing Console
o MvcScaffolding: Command line version of scaffolding. Scaffolding: “quickly generating a basic outline of your software that you can then edit and customise”. Reade more : http://blog.stevensanderson.com/2011/01/13/scaffold-your-aspnet-mvc-3-project-with-the-mvcscaffolding-package/
o Ninject.MVC3 : Dependency Injection tool
o Razor: Updated view engine in MVC3
o SQL compact
o IISExpress
ü Microsoft WebMatrix by Andy Robb
· Open source platform by MS(!) using ASP.NET, MVC, PHP, Razor
· Seems like a very quick platform for those who are new to development to get the site up and running quickly
· Personally I think in practice it can only be used for demo apps or for setting up the platform on the development machine