The New Zealand TechEd was awesome and I need to go again … next week would be nice.
The best memories I have were the sessions from the evangelists Rob Bagby and Scott Hanselman. Here is what kicked me the hardest at TechEd.
1. TDD – Everybody is using a mocking framework. If you don’t have this on your CV you will look like a dinosaur. There were no specific seminars on mocking because it was an “assumed known”. Read this if you are desperately out of touch and need urgent help.
2. REST – This is a WCF like service but REST does NOT use SOAP so it seriously reduces the request and response traffic to and from the hosting server. It also simplifies web service calls by putting much of the the request detail into the url. The best description of REST I have seen is here. See here for the TechEd examples by Rob Bagby (dude!) or here for more generic examples.
3. ASP.MVC – Overview is here. At TechEd, the inbuilt facility to route the url differently from the folder structure seemed overplayed.I do not like this framework even though Scott Gu and his guys do – too much code for the advantages you get – which seems to be just adding the testing capability form the web page down to the database. I would rather mock and have a simpler framework.
4. Fiddler – A nice tool to look at your web requests and responses – but if you use Firefox (i.e you are a developer) you will need to adjust your browser.
5. C# Utilities – Have a look at the New Zealand created C# utilities by James Newton-King. They are zipped up into a project and look to be the right stuff.
If you were at TechEd and are an aspiring evangelist, and loved the tool that does all those fancy zooms, arrows, lines and rectangles, better have a look at Zoomit .
