DevCorner is where we talk about all things software development-related from inside TechSmith. This is the place for interviews with our devs, source code samples, and an inside peek at some of the cool stuff we’re working on…
TechSmith recently sent fourteen of its own to attend Microsoft’s TechEd 2014 conference in Houston. We interview Faron Bracy, Senior Software Engineer, and Eric Beyer, Software Engineer, about their experience.
Faron Bracy, Senior Software Engineer and Eric Beyer, Software Engineer
Q: How did you prepare for the conference?
Faron: We used a shared document to collect questions from the entire company. Everyone was encouraged to contribute. It was our mission to then get those answered at the conference. We wanted to get deep questions that couldn’t be answered any other way. [tweet this]
The show floor at Microsoft TechEd 2014
Q: How did you communicate what you learned with your coworkers?
Eric: During the conference we used Slack, a chat channel, to communicate which sessions we were attending along with news and high level takeaways. We tried to have developers attend many different sessions so that we could collect as much information as possible. We took notes during the sessions and then shared our takeaways to the internal TechSmith developer blog. (Some of those takeaways posted below.)
Q: What surprised you about TechEd?
Eric: I wasn’t expecting so many opportunities to connect with Microsoft employees. This being my first large Microsoft conference, I was under the impression my interactions would be limited to attending sessions. However, Microsoft welcomed questions after the sessions and had dedicated hours for talking with attendees on the show floor.
Faron: I was not prepared for the number of people that would be attending. I knew it was a big conference but 12,000 people was a lot more than I had pictured in my mind. At any one time there might be 20 sessions or more going. It was difficult to decide which ones to attend.
Over 12,000 attended Microsoft TechEd 2014
Q: What would you do differently if you were attend TechEd again in the future?
Faron: I think I could do a better job networking with other people. It was fantastic to attend live sessions by big names and people whose blogs I follow like Scott Hanselman, Mads Kristensen, and Adam Machanic, but I should have spent more time on the Microsoft floor talking to their developers and asking them specific questions.
Eric: One thing I would do for the future is to coordinate what sessions I was attending in advance with fellow developer attendees to ensure we had broader session coverage. Secondly, I would liked to have done more initial research about session topics before attending and come with questions ready. I repeatedly heard from fellow attendees that one of the more powerful things you can do at TechEd is connect with presenters, but I didn’t feel I had good enough questions following a session to go up and start a discussion. Furthermore, I would have worked harder to network and meet Microsoft representatives. Being my first conference, I focused more on learning and absorbing as much information as a I could, rather than utilizing my surrounding environment to connect and network. [tweet this]
Q: What did you like best about TechEd?
Faron: I was excited to learn about what was planned for the future of .NET. I enjoyed spending time with co-workers. TechSmith sent fourteen people from across the company and we all met each night for dinner to debrief the day’s events. That was a great way to wind down each day and also have fun with the TechSmith family. A few of us even stayed an extra day to explore the city. [tweet this]
Eric: Finding the time to focus on learning can sometimes be difficult. It was incredible having a week dedicated to learning from other developers. I use their tools everyday. I absorbed an incredible amount of information, from key shortcuts in Visual Studio, to advancements in the .NET framework. It was also really rewarding spending time with co-workers I don’t often get to interact with on the daily basis. The closing party was also a blast! Microsoft rented out Minute Maid Park (the Houston Astros baseball stadium) and opened it up to TechEd attendees.
Eric Beyer having fun after hours at Microsoft TechEd 2014
High Level Takeaways
Continuous Modular Releases
The .NET team at Microsoft is focusing on being able to deliver rapidly and out-of-band with Visual Studio or operating systems releases. To accomplish this goal they are going to be creating NuGet packages for everything, including the CLR. This will allow you to install your application on any machine without worrying about which versions of .NET are installed. Global installation of .NET will not be required and your application will ship with everything that is needed to run it.
Openness
Everything moving forward in .NET will be in the foundation and will be open source. They will continue to release code publicly on GitHub and you can follow their commits every day as they build the features. You can even create your own pull requests, and several community contributions have already been approved. Along with this spirit of openness, the .NET team is doing everything they can to allow the code to run cross-platform and for you to be able to choose the editor you want to use. We saw a demo of an ASP.NET website created in Sublime and running on a Mac.
Web Essentials
Web Essentials is an extension that all web developers using Visual Studio could benefit from. We’ve been using Cassette to combine and minify our JavaScript and CSS to speed up page load times. Web Essentials does this in a really simple way, and as an extension, it is also tied directly into the Visual Studio UI.
Web Essentials doesn’t stop there though, it also has a complete Markdown editor, improved functionality when editing style sheets, and a range of Browser Link features available from a menu within your website when Browser link is running.
New in Azure
Azure Automation is now available for preview. They are currently accepting all applications to try the preview version and you can sign up for it through the Azure website. This will allow definition of automation scripts in powershell to orchestrate deployments, schedule updates, or automate most any task in Azure that you are currently performing manually.
There will also be a new Cloud optimized .NET framework that will be a mere 11 MB. This is in sharp contrast to the current framework which is closer to 200 MB. Not only will it be smaller but it will also run much faster.
ASP.NET vNext
The next version of ASP.NET will eliminate the build step, even for code-behind files. You’ll simply be able to save the file you are working on and refresh your browser and you’ll see the changes immediately. Some of the reasoning for introducing this change is due to the new spirit of openness as discussed earlier, so that any text editor could be used to build ASP.NET websites, not just Visual Studio.
MVC 6 will be a merged version of current MVC, Web API and Web Forms. For more information, the official .NET WebDev blog is where the team will be posting the most up-to-date news and information.
Eric Beyer is a developer who has assisted with the Ask3 and TechSmith Relay efforts. He has a passion for writing software that increases productivity and enriches the lives of its users. He enjoys playing board games and can likely be found playing sand volleyball in the summertime.
Faron Bracy is a Senior Software Engineer currently working on the Cloud Services Team at TechSmith.
- He maintains an open source library for writing roguelike games in C# which you can learn more about at http://roguesharp.wordpress.com/
- He enjoys flying remote control helicopters.
- His favorite thing to do on a nice day is to visit the zoo with his wife and 2 year old daughter.
The post DevCorner: Microsoft TechEd 2014 – Recap and Major Takeaways appeared first on TechSmith Blogs.
