Anthony Chu

Starting in late 2012, Microsoft has been putting their Agile practices to the test by moving to a 3-month update schedule for many of their products, including Visual Studio and ASP.NET. Last month, they shipped their ASP.NET and Web Tools Update 2012.2, which included lots of new features to Visual Studio's web tooling.

One of the lesser known new features is the support for new project templates to be installed via VSIX packages. This will allow third parties to produce project templates that we can install right into Visual Studio. One of the templates that has already come out is John Papa's HotTowel template for Single Page Applications (SPAs). It's a great starting point for building SPAs; and he even has a PluralSight course on how to build an app using this template. It uses many great frameworks such as jQuery, Twitter BootStrap, Knockout, Breeze; and they're all tied together with a fairly new framework called Durandal.

The biggest news coming out of the Microsoft ALM Summit this January was the new support for Git that was added to Team Foundation Service. Git has become the version control system of choice for many non-Microsoft developers around the world. It's pretty exciting that TFS has added it as a version control option when creating projects.

This was probably the best TechEd I’ve been to. For the first time, I was able to follow along in all the sessions I attended and was able to learn something in each one. This is much better than previous TechEds where I felt totally lost and behind on technology.

Here’s a few things that I learned…

• Visual Studio 2012 is pretty awesome, must start using it ASAP. (I’ve actually been trying it out already. It really is awesome.)
• Team Foundation Server 2012 is pretty awesome, must start using it ASAP (cloud version available atTFSPreview.com). It’s much better integrated with VS2012. I’m most impressed by its project management capabilities… it can replace MS Project, especially if we use Agile (see next point).
• Agile is a much better way to manage software projects than Waterfall. I need to learn more about it.
• Unit testing and Test Driven Development is worth doing. I need to learn more about this too.
• Async and parallel programming is the future. Lots of ways to leverage async on the web to increase ASP.NET performance and also to do really cool realtime stuff. It’s not just about parallel processing. .NET 4.5 makes asynchrony pretty simple.
• Lots of new features in ASP.NET in both WebForms and MVC… too many to list out here.
• In recent years, things like the iPhone and the iPad have raised the standards for** user experience**. It’s no longer enough to produce applications that just “does the job”, users now expect our apps to look great, work great, and be easy to use. We need to think about UX design in every new project from now on. It cannot be ignored or left as an afterthought. (Although our users are using BlackBerrys, so maybe we’re OK!)

I had a rough start to Wednesday as I had some sort of crazy allergy and my nose was runny and couldn’t sleep the night before. I had to skip the first session but I knew I had to make it to the second session of the day because the speaker was Billy Hollis and the guy is a rock star…

• Navigation User Experience – The line-up for this talk by Billy was already huge when I arrived half an hour before it started. Luckily I got a seat and he did not disappoint. Lots of great UX theory and tips as usual.
• Testing Untestable Code with Visual Studio 2012 – Another really good talk on testing. I learned a lot about TDD. I also learned about how VS2012 can generate stubs and shims for unit testing.
• New Language Features in C# and VB – I don’t know what happened with the one. The topic was OK but the talk just wasn’t very engaging. More than a few people got up and left. I felt a bit bad for the presenter.
• Agile in Visual Studio and TFS 2012 – Good talk about agile and how to use it with TFS. I didn’t know much about Agile but I now realize that I had be using it bit of it all long (sort of). It’s pretty awesome. I must learn more.
• Line of Business Apps in Windows 8 – This one was OK. Lots of code on the screen, a bit hard to follow. But I learned a few things.
• ASP.NET for Mobile and Tablets – About a minute into this talk, I realized it was the exact same talk I watched last week by Scott Hanselman (another Scott who thinks Wonder Reader is pretty cool). It was still very good, but can’t say I learned anything new.
• Entity Framework 4.3 Real World Applications – This was a really good session. Learned a lot of stuff I can do with EF. Now if only we ran SQL Server instead of Oracle, this stuff would actually work!
• What’s New in .NET 4.5 – Decent talk about what’s new in 4.5. I knew about most of them but did learn things like the new Portable Class Libraries which we can use to create executables that can be used in different versions of .NET, as well as across platforms like WPF, Silverlight, WinRT.
• Design for Non Designers – It was OK for the last talk of the conference. Scored a bag with design related stuff.

Matt and I went to a lunch time seminar at TechEd about career planning. It was hosted by the awesome Paul Thurott of Windows Weekly on Twit TV. Jeff Snover (the inventor of PowerShell), gave a great 20 minute talk about the importance of career planning. He suggested that we should do what we love, invest in learning skills in technologies that will be successful and relevant, and stay away from technologies that have no future (Matt and I couldn’t help but laugh about that one… <cough> JD Edwards <cough>).

He ended the talk with this slide, which was very fitting considering the things that lie ahead in our careers…