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TechEd 2012 – Days 3 & 4

Friday, June 15, 2012

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.