I just got back from DevWeek 2013 at the Barbican Centre in London. I enjoyed all the sessions I attended and have documented a few key presentations below.
Tuesday Morning: Modelling and implementing hierarchies with SQL Server
Presenter
- Bob Beauchemin from SQLskills
- Bob’s Website
- Bob’s Twitter feed
Session Overview
Bob’s session looked at support in SQL Server for hierarchical data, comparing and contrasting the methods of maintenance and query. He focussed on SQL Server’s hierarchyID data type and compared against adjacency model, nested set model, and XML storage and query.
Slides & Code Samples
Tuesday Afternoon (Session 1): The world of HTML5 and CSS3
Presenter
- K Scott Allen from Ode to Code
- Scott’s Website
- Scott’s Twitter feed
Session Overview
Laid back speaker Scott Allen looked at the benefits of using HTML 5 and CSS 3. He gave demonstrations of new features such as websockets, webworkers, animations, transitions, and SVG to demonstrate how to build rich applications with the latest standards. A joy to watch!
Slides, References & Code Samples
- http://html5test.com/ – Browser compatibility test
- http://html5boilerplate.com/ – Boiletplate templates
- http://www.css3.info/preview/ – CSS3 preview site
- http://caniuse.com/ – Check HTML 5 supported elements
- http://thehtml5quiz.com/ – Name HTML elements in 5 minutes
- For debugging WebSockets, you can’t use fiddler right now, you would need to use something like WireShark
- Code can be found here: https://t.co/3vineLMtJN
Tuesday Afternoon (Session 2): Taking advantage of C# 5 async/await
Presenter
- Andrew Clymer from Rock Solid Knowledge
- Andrew’s Website
- Andrew’s Twitter feed
Session Overview
.NET 4 introduced the new ‘task’ abstraction, and C# 5 will take advantage of integrating this into the language via the async and await keywords. Furthermore, the new task abstraction promotes a new way of architecting asynchronous behaviour; in this talk we will explore how to take advantage of these new keywords and other new types and features being exposed in the next version of .NET to deliver far simpler asynchronous Windows UIs.