A couple of weeks ago, some of the Madgex developers took advantage of the Microsoft UK Tech Days week of Developer Days events at Fulham’s Vue cinema. Six members of the development team attended three events between them, being present for the Visual Studio 2010 Launch event, the Visual Studio 2010 and .Net event and the Windows Phone event.
Visual Studio 2010 Launch
The first event of the week was aimed at Heads of Development, Development Managers and Software architects and featured a whistle-stop tour of the key features of VS2010. Our Development Managers were present and were impressed with some of the features of the Ultimate edition – especially liking Architecture Explorer and Test Manager. From the .Net 4 features being showcased, they were both impressed with the parellism offerings, and were keen to try it out to make the products even more scalable.
Visual Studio 2010 and .Net
Four developers made the trip to Fulham for day 2. As is typical, they all took away different highlights, including:
- the echoing of the Development Managers enthusiasm for parellism
- improvements to Silverlight making it a technology worth looking into again
- improvements in Entity Framework making it worth looking at again, especially as the speakers were open about the drawbacks of the original release
- multi-monitor support – all our development team have 2 monitors each, being able to make use of them within the IDE will be good
- the idea that our QA team could record their test actions in a permanent manner which the developer can then use to debug as if in real time rewinding and fast-forwarding as necessary until finding that bug (intellitrace)
- diagramming tools via Architecture Explorer
- the idea of “gated check-ins” via Team Foundation Server seems to have been one of the more contentious points with a 50/50 split between loving the idea and hating it
Windows Phone
One development manager attended this event to learn more about Windows Phone 7 and to see what the Microsoft view of the future of mobile was. Again, the speakers were honest about where things were sub-optimal in their existing offerings and went to lengths to explain the improvements. Microsoft sound like they’re following the Apple model and are controlling the hardware to prevent dilution of the brand and prevent development fragmentation, and will also provide an app store model meaning a certification and validation process (not a crowd pleaser). The search functionality will be powered by bing and apparently “a puppy dies each time you use google“. The Push notification is HTTP REST based, which was enough to get our Development Manager all fired up and enthused and ready to start developing.
Summary
All of the attendees seemed to come back with areas they’d like to spend some time looking into, and one team at our internal hackday last week was dedicated to making use of some of the VS2010/.Net 4/Silverlight 4 features, so they were obviously inspired.