Top 10 Takeaways from DevConnections Day Two
November 10th 2009 | Jimmy Bosse
Top 10 Takeaways from DevConnections Day Two
Tuesday at DevConnections (#devconnections) was a whirlwind of excellent sessions by the Microsoft ASP.NET team. It started with the Keynote by Scott Guthrie (@scottgu) and went on to feature what’s new in ASP.NET 4.0 and VS 2010 Web Development. Shortly after were four great sessions:
- The Future of C# by Charlie Calvert.
- What’s New in ASP.NET MVC.
- What’s New in the AJAX Control Toolkit and Microsoft Ajax Library (#devconnajax) by Jim Wang (@turanuk) and James Senior (@jsenior)
- Testing in ASP.NET by Federico Silva Armas
After so many enlightening sessions, my Evernote notebook is filled with many amazing things that I learned, even with my laptop battery dying twice. It is hard to whittle them down to ten but here goes, again in no particular order.
-
VS 2010 supports multiple monitors.
You can finally move a document off the tab and onto a second monitor. Now you don’t have to waste that beautiful 24” monitor just filling it with palettes!
-
The Web.Config file of a new web project is empty.
Ok it has a few lines of XML, but it is no longer War & Peace.
-
C# will now have named parameters.
At first this gave me flashbacks of Objective-C, but I have come to embrace this new feature. While today’s IDEs make it easy to see the
signature of methods to understand what the parameters of a method call are, it is great at quick glance to see explicitly what each one
is without having to dig into the code, like in a printout or blog post. -
C# and VB will have access to the DLR.
Sitting on top of the Dynamic Language Runtime will allow your C# code to create a variable of type dynamic to hold references to objects
(like COM Interop) and call methods you know exist on those objects, without the compiler complaining. -
Say goodbye to <%= Html.Encode({something}) %>
And hello to <%: {something} %>. Isn’t that better?
-
Areas will help you with your giant Controller directory
A new feature called “Areas”, will allow you to divide your giant MVC projects into more logical directory structures.
-
Microsoft Ajax Minifier
If performance is paramount in your website, this tool will squeeze every last byte out of your JavaScript libraries.
-
Ajax Library Preview 6.
The demos from this library were really slick. Go get it and make your website sparkle.
-
Lightweight Test Automation Framework
While there are too many automated UI testing frameworks out there, experience has shown that each one is good for different
testing scenarios. You can quickly tack LTAF on to your website and get started with UI testing. -
Custom Logging for LTAF
Extending logging in LTAF to meet your needs is nice. Federico even mentioned a custom logger that would screenshot
the browser when the test failed. Now that is a great idea! -
BONUS!!! WebSiteSpark
If you are and independent developer or a small shop, check out WebSiteSpark (http://www.microsoft.com/web/websitespark/).
For $100 you get access to an amazing set of Microsoft tools and technologies to help get you started.
Today promises to be another flurry of fantastic sessions. Check back tomorrow for more highlights from DevConnections.
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