MS TechDays 2011 – Summary
Microsoft TechDays 2011 event was held at 18th of May 2011 in Skopje, Macedonia. There were five sessions, covering several development areas.
Sessions List
- Building Web Sites with Orchard (Hajan Selmani, MKDOT.NET UG)
- Building Business Applications with Visual Studio LightSwitch (Dejan Dimitrovski, MKDOT.NET UG)
- Community Session – SharePoint 2010 Service Applications (Darko Milevski, MKDOT.NET UG)
- Agile Development with Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010 (Karl Davies-Barrett, Microsoft)
- Developing for Windows Phone 7 – End to End (Filip Kerazovski, MKDOT.NET UG)
Mr. Karl was talking at the keynote. His keynote speech was excellent. His speech was inspiring, motivating and he simply brought us more enthusiasm about future of development with Microsoft technologies (Thank You Karl!).
Now, I would like to go with short overview of each presentation, so that those who weren’t there will know what did they miss.
Building Web Sites with Orchard (me)
As
you may already know, Orchard is free, open source,
content-driven management system built by Microsoft. It is
built on top of ASP.NET MVC 3 with Razor view engine and is
the most extensible CMS I have ever been working to date (I
have experience with DotNetNuke, Umbraco, Joomla, Wordpress
and few other similar systems).
In my session, I tried
to show attendees what they can do with Orchard. Firstly, I
passed the idea behind Orchard, why you can’t say “it’s yet
another CMS”, but an open source CMS that is for everyone
(end-users, designers, developers, IT Pros) and can help you
quickly and with the speed of light bring your website up
and running. Even though Orchard is still young (currently
v1.1) , it has many features, so I covered part of its
features by creating website. We have passed through
content, content types, widgets, zones, layers, parts, user
and role management, blogs, modules & installing modules
from gallery, working directly from command prompt by
running bin/orchard.exe. I have also installed interesting
modules, like twitter feeds. We made also localization and
translation. Besides all that, I’ve been working with
WebMatrix tool, so attendees who haven’t seen WebMatrix in
action, have had chance to see it. I also showed the Orchard
solution and code structure.
As I said, Orchard is
completely extensible and is very great to start with. Soon
we will have Orchard localization / translation in
Macedonian (Македонски) language. I’m working on it.
Website:
http://orchardproject.net
I was very glad that I had some interesting questions during
and after the session. Which proved that the presentation
was interesting for the attendees.
Building Business Applications with Visual Studio
LightSwitch (Dejan Dimitrovski)
I have started digging in Visual Studio LightSwitch
somewhere in September/October 2010, but I hadn’t chance to
dig more and see it’s capabilities. In this session, we were
all amazed! Dejan built complete application in about 30 –
40 minutes, showing the real Visual Studio LightSwitch’s
capabilities for building Business Applications. I have
heard some guys in the audience saying ‘wow’ when Dejan
showed that you can build and run your app only by working
with mouse! (and one or two lines of code) :)
I like
everything LightSwitch can do for us. The thing I liked the
most was the runtime designer, but other features aren’t far
behind, indeed! It’s still in beta and it’s already amazing!
I’m looking forward to dig much more inside it in the
following period! Thank You Dejan for the Excellent
presentation!
Community Session – SharePoint 2010 Service Applications
(Darko Milevski)
Up to now, I have had little chance to play with
SharePoint, and also I have attended several sessions, few
of them held by Darko Milevski. I said him in his blog, if
someone makes me start developing with SharePoint, it will
be Darko, definitely. Again, he showed some interesting
stuff on what you can do with SharePoint 2010. Service
Applications seems very great. Darko explained very well the
logical concept behind Service Applications. With his
presentation, attendees were able to see the significant
architectural improvements in SharePoint with Service
Applications model. Great job Dare!
P.S. Before making
complex calculations again (eg. 2+3?), first move the app on
the cloud ;)! hehehe…
Agile Development with Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010
(Karl Davies-Barrett)
I’m working with Agile Development and Scrum
methodology, but when someone like Karl is talking on such
topic, you will always hear something you didn’t know,
something new or at least advice that is priceless. Karl was
great in both, in his keynote session, as well as this one.
It is invaluable experience to have chance to listen Karl’s
sessions and learn directly from someone with 15+ years
experience in IT, someone who who works in Microsoft Corp.
He showed what you can achieve with VS.NET 2010 and TFS
2010, and how you can accelerate the Agile development using
both of these technologies. Excellent presentation! Thank
You Karl!
Developing for Windows Phone 7 – End to End (Filip
Kerazovski)
Even though I’m expert in Web Development, I’m also a
big fun of Development for Mobile, so when I have extra
time, I read something about it or playing with it (looking
forward to make my first Mobile app very soon). This was
very attractive session for me because I wanted to see
something I didn’t know since I’m preparing myself for
getting into WP7 Development too (besides Web Development
with ASP.NET, which is my primary focus). Filip works with
me in same company and has his office desk right near me, so
I already knew part of his speech. However, in this session
he showed amazing stuff that I didn’t see previously. He
managed to finish an app in front of the audience in about
30minutes, showing the push notification concept and using
MVVM pattern, he built WP7 app with some interesting voting
features. Moreover, he made the push notifications to go
from his custom made website, through a WCF service and the
Push Notification service, up to the Smart Phone. Great
presentation, indeed! Thanks Filip.
I would also like to THANK Dimitar Grozdanov (Technology Strategist at Microsoft) who helped us prepare for the event and, together with Karl, were great hosts of the event.
Networking with other Professionals
I was very glad to see other developers, IT professionals, consultants, trainers, business people and many other in the event. I’m especially glad that I saw some friends and acquaintances whom I haven’t seen for a while. Besides the speakers, I also saw and had some talks with Vlatko (latek), Ivan Acev, Mile, Tosho, Boban and some other people I respect for what they do in their professional life! I must also mention that I met Daniel Joskovski, with whom I had talk few times during the event. He is really very nice person and it was my pleasure to meet him there. There were few of my co-workers, who attended all presentations - thanks guys. Also, very big thanks to all ladies and gentleman who get in touch with me to talk about popular issues in ASP.NET Web Development and .NET in general, or have had some interesting questions about Orchard CMS.
Thank You
Thank You everyone for the great event, and once again Thank
You Microsoft, for bringing us all together in such
events which give attendees great opportunity to get to know
more about Microsoft technologies and see why Microsoft
technologies are the best choice for Developers, IT
Professionals, Designers, Business people / companies and
End Users.
If you attended the event, please do
let me know your feedback by commenting to this post.
Thank You,
Hajan