NerdParade

Just back from DevWeek 2010!

There was the run-of-the-mill-glitziness surrounding the Entity Framework, Silverlight and the AJAX Client Framework, all of which have had some fairly interesting improvements of late. AJAX expecially so. It's now at one" with jQuery! Yay!

Whilst these, mostly demo-based, sessions contained the usual mix of "gosh that's clever" and "oh dear", I feel that the issues surrounding data and binding things to other things in UI are mostly solved problems. The much more interesting topics to me were more around the "high art" end of distributed computing. As the worlds software evolves from a collection of client/server based applications towards a collection of dynamically enlisted services hosted on the web/cloud, problems of identity, security and trust, scalability and parrallelism become more and more important.

I saw a number of presentations which were genuinely facinating. Some fairly high level (on Windows Identity Foundation), some lower (on Multi-Threading). 2 talks on Security by Dominick Baier were very good and Christian Weyers Demonstration of the Azure Service Bus was the highlight for me. Christian certainly understands how to hold an audiences attention, and even got a round of applause for something which could have been seen as quite dry material if delivered by a lesser presenter. Great stuff.

Also, thanks to the very smart Jeff Richter. I now fully understand how the "volatile" keyword in C# works. Thank you Jeff!