London Guathon DDD Event
Last Friday I had the good fortune (as well as good friends who did the booking for me) to attend London Guathon DDD event. This was a free community event hosted by Microsoft to reveal their latest technology roadmaps and strategies. Within the geek community these event tickets are as prized as the golden ones within Wonka Bars with all 240 places being filled in less than 20min.
Despite being late due to the Runaway tube train and the Northern line being closed I managed to get to the Odeon in Covent Garden just on time (OK, I was 15 minutes late, but the session started 15 minutes after I arrived).
ScottGu in London Guathon DDD
Scott Guthrie opened up the event with an introduction to the sessions of the day. These sessions spanned four different aspects of Microsoft’s new technologies:
- VS 2010 and ASP.NET 4
- ASP.NET MVC 2
- Windows Phone 7 Development
- Web Development Futures: ASP.NET MVC 3, SQL CE and IIS Express
What was cool?
First session had many tips and tricks from Scott ‘Gu’ including some which are guaranteed to make the geeks squeal with delight.
The second session was the real meat in the sandwich for those who care about content and the way it is presented. For the past 10 years, ASP.Net was a great platform in terms of development productivity and for building enterprise applications. But its weakness was in the poor quality front-end code it generated; something that LBi interface developers and SEO consultants constantly complained about. However, Microsoft’s new ASP.NET MVC will be a game changer in this part (there are useful packages in IIS 7 to help on the SEO side.)
And yes, Windows Phone 7 will be released around October in UK. Microsoft intends to send a strong statement of intent to the smart phones market. Mike Ormond’s slides on the day can be found here.
And finally, In the last session on Web futures Scott Gu announced new technologies including IIS Express, MVC3, code-first Entity Framework, Razor (the new view engine for ASP.NET) that is going to be released soon by Microsoft. Then he discussed the common themes of these new developments which are to keep the existing technologies working better and cleaner and to enable extensibility and customization.
Revolutionary… No, but Microsoft are moving in the right direction whilst correcting some of the legacy issues of .Net. Who knows one day we may be able to have more than one form again…
Microsoft continue to pick up many of the good ideas that have been implemented in other languages for a little while and we’re starting to see some real productivity improvements as a consequence. However Microsoft remains a big beast and how these developments relate to the Sharepoints and Silverlights of the world remains to be seen. Refinement rather than reinvention is definitely order of the day for Microsoft and for that they should be commended.
Tags: ASP.NET, IIS, Microsoft, mobile, mvc, Technology, UK, VS2010, Web design, WP7