As I said on my previous post I was given the opportunity to be at DevDays in The Netherlands. If you haven't read it, I suggest you start with it. You will find in the beginning my overall impression over the conference. In this post I will just summaries the sessions I've attended in the second day of the conference.

I've started the day with "Codename "Dublin": Windows Application Server" by Aaron Skonnard, co-founder of Pluralsight. This was a totally new subject for me. It turns out that is not too easy to say what Dublin is. Anyhow, from I've understood Dublin extends IIS / Windows Application Server to enhance support for WCF and WWF 4.0. It will create over IIS a host for WCF and WWF. It will provide monitoring for services, endpoints and database persistence. There was a demo of a long running service process implemented by a WWF which called 4 WCF services. This was an "out-of-the-box" functionality, meaning that Dublin extensions persisted and resumed the WWF, plus it also recalled WCF services if they failed. There was built in UI, for doing all configurations needed and for monitoring the process.. What we've seen in the demo was pre beta code, and it wasn't that stable. I guess it will take a while until we'll be able to grab it and play with it too.

My second session was "Pimp my Workflow! Moving from WF 3.x to 4.0" by Matt Milner from Pluralsight. I wrote about it in my previous post, so I will not repeat it here.

After lunch, I went to see how to "Pimp Up Your SharePoint Site". The session was held by Jan Tielens from U2U, Belgium. He proved to be a very experienced web developer and a good trainer. Even if I have some experience with SharePoint, I found this session really useful, because Jan showed a bunch of really impressive tips and tricks on how we can considerably improve the user experience on a SharePoint site. He started with something quite common for an ASP.NET developer. He demonstrated the easiest way to use AJAX in a custom Web Part by making use of the Update Panel. Although, this is a trivial thing to do, he pointed something which might give headaches: there is an incompatibility between SharePoint and the java script used by Update Panel. The problem and the workaround are described by Mike Ammerlaan in his blog. Jan also mentioned the opened source Smart Part project, which is the wrapper Web Part we can use to wrap a user control. This is helpful when we are building a Web Part by creating a user control, using the help of Visual Studio designer, and then the Web Part just instantiates it. Smart Part supports both normal ASP.NET Web User Controls and ASP.NET Web User Controls using the ASP.NET AJAX extensions. After this, he moved to the real cool stuff: making use of java script to improve SharePoint UI, more exactly using jQuery library. In fact he did a demonstration of how to use his opened source project called: "SmartTools for SharePoint Project". He made use of some custom aspx pages to deploy on SharePoint Server the needed java script. The scripts were added to a SharePoint list. Then he demonstrated how to use it, with a Content Editor Web Part, to customize a list overview, to highlight the row on which the mouse cursor is. The other demo was on, how to implement, also using java script, a filtered lookup. He had 3 lists for: training, which has a field with values from technologies list, which has a field from platforms list. When for a training we chose a technology with the combobox, we want that the platforms combobox items to be filtered by a chosen technology. To do this he used another custom installation page from his project to load the java script in the master page. I found these two demos to be the most delightful part of the presentation. I think that if you want to use some java script in your SharePoint, you should look over Jan's SmartTools for SharePoint Project. It might prove to be a really useful resource.  He ended by showing how to use Silverlight controls in a Web Part. He mentioned http://visifire.com as a good source for open source Silverlight controls.

Not all the sessions were technical. There were also sessions on Project Management or on planning and organizing of software development. The non-technical session we've been at was "How Development is Done @ Microsoft". The speaker was Gert Drapers , from Microsoft, Software Architect in the Windows Server Directory Services team. He also was the Lead Software Architect and Engineering Manager of the Visual Studio Team System Database Edition. For me, the word that characterized the development at Microsoft, how was presented in this session, was: "DISCIPLINE". There were a lot of "must", "have to", "there is no other way". I guess that when you are dealing with huge projects with fixed deadlines as Microsoft does, you have to have discipline. Otherwise, you can't manage. It was mentioned that for Visual Studio, the team is of 3000 people. That is a lot to control. To me, in this presentation, Microsoft looked like a huge army which manages to do enormous software projects. There were examples like if your check-in has broken the night build, then you get a call, at 3 o'clock in the morning, and you have to get online and fix it. Otherwise, you jeopardize the work of the testers next day. We've also learned that in some projects, at least the ones managed by Gert, they are doing SCRUM. The interesting thing was that they had in the beginning the same difficulties we had when we tried SCRUM in one of our projects. Things like to convince everyone to work in an agile way, by doing each functionality from UI to DB. To convince the testers to test only part of the system, to convince the developers not to think and develop layer after layer, but one piece of functionality in all layers. We've also learned that they are using Wideband Delphi to estimate. I haven't heard of it before, but from the quick reading I've done, it looks to be a quite useful estimation method. I will surely give it some attention, to see how we can also use it. The skills Gert mentioned to be a must for a developer at Microsoft are: OS internals (he really outlined this), advanced C# (expectable), advance debugging techniques (he talked a lot about the importance of it) and design patterns (also expectable). Overall he reinforced my feeling that you really have to be a good programmer to develop for Microsoft. So, these were the most important thinks I remember about this presentation. Of course, he ended exactly on time, without time for questions.

Our last presentation was "ASP.NET MVC Introduction" by Fritz Onion co-founder of Pluralsight. Indeed it was just an introduction. Only basic stuff, nothing spectacular. There were demos on how to map URLs to methods from the controller, which indeed is the essence, but nothing more. Anyhow, we had to leave about 15 minutes earlier, to make sure that we catch our plane back home, so maybe we've just missed the good part.