MSWebDay – What I took away from it
Today, Feb 16th, I attended MSWebdevday ran by Microsoft in Glasgow which was an event covering all things web related from Microsoft, the speakers were @christosmatskas, @thebeebs and @martinkearn and was an all day event.
The Schedule for the day covered various topics and it was great to learn so many new things and get my first glimpse at some new technologies, I always love learning something new, and I even sat next to the illustrious Gary Ewan Park, someone who I have chatted to a few times on twitter but not every managed to meet.
Ok so lets cover the actual event:-
The first talk was by on What’s New in ASP.Net Core 1.0 and was a tour of the new features, how to get it, how to use it, whats new, whats no longer there and he also talked about how you can just take the files and drop them into a folder when deploying, there’s no gac, you can just deploy the Core files in a folder alongside your code, this is very neat, its cross-platform, and it means you could have the same site running under different version of Core going forward should you choose to or need to have this.
The second Talk was Building with JavaScript Task Runners, this was mainly about how to get gulp, how to set it up and how to run some tasks to minify your css, javascript files and all that good stuff, how to add it into Visual Studio as a build step after you compile your code, showed an example gulp file and lots more.
The third talk was Entity Framework Core 1.0, and covered EF and how to use it, how to use code first and also mentioned EF6 how its improved greatly from previous versions and why you should choose this version at the moment whilst EF Core 1.0 is still being worked on and has the tooling added to it for the Core 1.0 release.
The fourth talk was APIs: the cogs behind the machine and this talk was about api’s and mainly web api and how in Core 1.0 there is no MVC and WebAPI its just one thing now and your controller is an API controller, so no need for MVC and WebAPI there is just the controllers now which kind of merge both together.
The fifth talk was Dev Ops in Azure and this covered deploying your website to Azure, making changes, showing the changes, getting the publisher file for using in side Visual Studio and publishing your changes from Visual Studio using Git int his example to deploy your changes from within VS up to the new Azure portal.
The sixth talk was Hitchhikers Guide to JavaScript, this talk focused on ECMAScript and the future of JavaScript and basically how a lot more code that we write will be JavaScript and we saw examples of the features coming in the next few years etc.
The seventh talk was Web Performance and how to check your websites performance using tools like YSlow and Google Page Speed etc and then how to go about making it make far less requests, cache JavaScript, enable IIS features and how to optimise images etc to make your website perform much faster that it currently does.
The eight talk was Single Page Applications and was about KnockoutJS and Angular, talking about Angular 2 and how it makes use of TypeScript and showed code covering KnockoutJS and AngularJS.
The ninth talk was about Hybrid Web Apps and how you can create application that can appear as Windows 8/10 tiles, make use of Microsoft Office and showed some very neat stuff using ManifoldJS which is itself very cool stuff.
Other stuff mentioned
I wrote some notes during the talks (should have taken a lot more) but a couple of things I need to look at are listed below:-
- Developer Developer Developer Day in Scotland – DDD Scotland
- WebHackWednesday on Channel 9 – WebHackWednesday
- Free tools for cross-browser testing – Dev.MicrosoftEdge.com
- Project Oxford Api – Just go play here and try it out
- TodoMVC – Helping you select an MV* framework
- Remove the # in urls in Angular – use Html5Mode within routing config.
- Microsoft Virtual Academy – Free Online Technical Training
Summary
The event was great, full days learning, a lot of content covered, great speakers and good turn out. Spoke to some guys I chat to on twitter and all in all an awesome day spent learning some new stuff. There was a lot of content, I’ve missed half of it I’m sure so take a look at the slides on the site at MSWebdevday.
Dear Microsoft can we have some more of these days please? – especially Azure and Core related content.
Sounded great. I’ll have to see if they are running one in belfast!
[…] lot of satisfied customers happy to shout about their experiences, such as this from developer Gregor Suttie who attended the Glasgow Microsoft Web Day last month: “The schedule for the day covered various […]