Five seminars viewed today. The somewhat misnamed “Developing Data-Centric Web Applications” turned out to be a fascinating discussion on the relatively new ASP.NET “Dynamic Data” feature. This is sort of a belated response from Microsoft to the Ruby on Rails hype from a few years ago. You know, generate a web site based on your data in under ten minutes flat. But unlike Ruby on Rails, elements from “Dynamic Data” can be plucked out and added to a more traditional ASP.NET control based application thereby significantly simplifying and decoupling them.
In fact, the ASP.NET markup was just plain clean. The disadvantage being that support currently only exists for LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities data providers in the current version. However, we were promised that succeeding versions will have dramatically improved data provision support, hopefully for the ubiquitous WCF client proxy as well.
I tried one of the Interactive Sessions on “SQL Tricks from Microsoft IT”. The wily presenter seemed steeped in T–SQL lore, or maybe he’d just seen it all. Anyway, some interesting hacks and discussions of idiosyncratic T-SQL engine behavior were discussed. The XML processing techniques were of most interest. As with most developers, I feel processing XML within a database is just plain wrong.
My next appointment was with “a Lap around Live Mesh”. This appears to be Microsoft’s latest technique to find out everything there is to know about all their customers in the guise of federated identity and data “omnipresence”. While the stuff looked pretty sweet, I couldn’t help feeling I’d be vulnerable to their tender mercies having all my data lodged out in the wholly owned subsidiary of the internet that is “the cloud”. When I discovered that client data couldn’t be held encrypted for search facilitation, (hah!) I reckoned I wouldn’t be lining Microsoft’s cloud with my silver.
Next up was a riveting discussion on practical ASP.NET MVC usage. Most of the talk covered advanced MVC stuff, but the presenter, Hadi Hariri, managed to sneak a good twenty minutes in on JQuery. Microsoft appears all for the adoption of JQuery these days. Between the now traditional, ASP.NET server-side component model and the ultra-sophisticated, but rarely adopted, Silverlight, a gap in the market appeared to be yawning. Championed by the likes of Gmail and the GWT, JavaScript rendered page elements have been successfully appearing in many of the new web development frameworks. JQuery adoption appears to give Microsoft a rapid, legitimate counter position without directly watering down the large Silverlight investment already undertaken.
My final discussion was a deep dive into the concurrency runtime. This turned into being an interesting discussion of the concurrency algorithms considered for the new Parallelism features buried deep in .NET 4.0. Having to develop performance critical enterprise applications for DSI, I have been avidly tracing activity in this area. Maximizing application use of multi-core technology is critical to our future app development. By understanding the problems and seeing the solutions, in this plainly, extremely specialized and highly skilled segment of software development, has given me an excellent feel for how to make the most of these new features, once they reach production anyway. The presenter (a disgustingly brainy “Joe Duffy”) was at pains to point out that having the code available still requires developers to adopt good latent parallelism techniques early to facilitate the ready adoption of these features once they come of age.
More tomorrow hopefully. I have to brave the Irish contingent’s “Country specific drinks” session. Hopefully there’ll be no human fish at it.
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