Understanding the ASP.NET Model-View-Controller – Scott Guthrie
The ASP.NET MVC project
is a strange one for me. A few months back I read up on it and thought
it looked really good but I’ve not actually had the time to try it out.
Scott’s presentation was excellent. What I especially liked was the way
he showed the warty way of doing something and then showed the simpler
method. This is excellent because the warty way makes it obvious what
the code is actually doing, whereas too many people only show the nice
clean method which makes it far harder to understand what is happening
under the covers. Some of the features I haven’t seen before were just
excellent, the validation messages were really well handled. I’m very
impressed by MVC, I don’t have a lot of love for the ASP.NET psudeo
event model/page life-cycle. Well worth attending the dev-based
presentation. 10/10.
Computing power, screens, and networks: Impact on authored content – Tim Regan
Tim
was, by his own admission, a little nervous presenting but he shouldn’t
be. I would group the mobile part of the presentation in the, ‘ways to
visualize data’ presentations with a specific focus on analysing
literature. I found it very interesting but since I don’t have a need
to analyse patterns in literature the specifics are of much to use to
me directly. But again it re-enforced my interest in thinking about
different ways to present data. Good presentation but some difficult
for me to use in my every-day role – 7/10
Beauty & the Geek – The Perfect blend of left & right brain – Conchango
Following
in the MS Expression wave of designers & developers working
together Conchango shared their experiences. I’ve worked in this area a
bit and it was interesting to hear how they were getting around some of
the problems, e.g. no version control for the designer. I thought it
was interesting to make someone the owner of the xaml. I was a little
surprised to hear that the developer spent so much time in Blend. I
think that the separation of Blend and Visual Studio is a great way to
ring-fence the responsibility. I agree that Visual Studio does need
better basic handling of xaml in the design, at least to be able to
navigate around the visual tree and highlight the xaml, but apart from
that leave Blend well alone unless you really are a designer! It was
also interesting to hear the pair-programming style of working (even
more reason for the dev to leave Blend alone) as in my experience there
is usually a fair amount of delay between the developer and the
designer re-synchronizing their efforts. Interesting presentation and
it’s nice to hear the experience of others. I think the developer vs.
designer jokes are a little weak these days but I can forgive
that…oooh get me š 8/10
Behind Every Great Site There is Great Data – Eric Nelson
I’ve
had the good fortune to attend a number of Microsoft seminars hosted by
Eric over the years, yes I do remember him joining (good grief).
Although obviously Eric works for Microsoft but I’ve always thought his
presentations are from the point of view of their customers, i.e.
telling us as it is rather than as it should be. To be honest I nearly
didn’t attend this as I’ve had some exposure to these technologies and
had written some of them as too imature, but I thought it would be good
to hear Eric’s impression. In this presentation Eric did a good job on
untangling the differences between Linq to SQL and Linq to Entities (he
has a great diagram for this on his blog) and although I still remain sceptical about the EDM I certainly feel more comfortable understand
how keep the path to it open. I would have liked a few min’s about
where this fits into a n-tier design, e..g where to put the business
rules but overall I’m glad I attended. 9/10
Mobile User Experience – Inspiring new ways of design & development – Antony Ribot
Antony
talked about the issues of providing a quality and clear interface for
the various mobile devices out there. I felt the content was fine but,
for me, the presentation wasn’t as slick. This resulting in a slightly
muddled message, however Antony is clearly a smart person, perhaps a
bit of nerves. 6/10
Sneak Peak and end – Paul Foster
A few little demos and adverts and a Balmer-like burst from Paul š He did re-enforce the importance of letting people have the time to be creative, something I yearn for in my current post.
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