18th April 2010
Continuing the theme of keeping myself busy with geek events! I also recently attended the Microsoft UK Tech Days Visual Studio and .NET 4 talks.
To be fair a lot of the content was similar to what I had already heard at ddd8. So we're talking Optional Parameters, Named Arguments, Generic Variance and Dynamic Typing for .NET 4 plus multi-monitor support, changes to code highlighting and javascript intellisense and a WPF interface for Visual Studio... I particularly liked the 'code only' profile for VS that disables some unnecessary services and hides all windows/toolbars except for the editor and solution explorer.
In addition to this the parallelisation features of .net were discussed (AsParallel(), PLINQ) - something that's always intriguing and worth trying out. And there were niceities too for asp.net. Caching being pushed into a provider model, controllable client IDs and a far more slimline web.config are all a part of this.
Overall
Having not made the trip down to Bournemouth for re:develop 1 or 2 it was great to be in attendance for it's third incarnation.
Making games over a weekend... competitively... and we chose a dead technology... why the hell not!
Hack Days are awesome. How could they not be? you get to make stuff with like minded people with no bosses, no client deadlines, no point but the love of it.
It's been a while since I posted. I'd like to say that's because a lot's been going on. In reality I got lazy and now I just happen to have something to write about that can make it sound like a lot has been going on.