Houston TechFest 2009 – Recap

I attended the Houston TechFest last weekend and I have to say it was a great turnout. According to the web site there were 858 people in attendance. There were 14 tracks containing 70+ sessions.

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Below are the sessions that I attended and some notes I took along the way.

What’s New In Silverlight 3.0

Presenter: Todd Anglin
This presentation gave a great high-level explanation of Silverlight 3.0 and Rich Internet Applications.

Silverlight is not (nor will be anytime soon) available for the iPhone. Apple does not allow this type of plugin.

High Points of Silverlight 3.0

• GPU Acceleration
• Out of Browser (Fit Client)
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Assembly Caching
• Validation Templates
• SaveFileDialog
• Cached Composition
• Network Monitoring
• 3-D Support

What’s New in Silverlight 3.0 – Slides and Demo Code

Introduction to iPhone Development

Presenter: Ben Scheirman
This presentation covered the requirements for developing on the iPhone as well as some syntax and frameworks.

Requirements

• A Mac
• X-Code (free)
• iPhone SDK (free – limited to simulator)
• iPhone Developer Program ($99)

Language – Objective C
Based on C, Dynamic, Object Oriented, Powerful

Ben provided a great primer on Objective C. I have to say, it is quite different from any syntax I have ever encountered.

[photo setCaption : @"Day at the beach."];
NSString* caption = [photo caption];

Some of the topics touched on in the primer

• Multi-Input
• Accessors
• Memory Management
• Header Files
• Implementation Files
• Categories (like extension methods)
• Key Value Coding (like reflection)

Frameworks and Libs

• Cocoa Touch
• AddressBook
• Camera
• Accelerometer – Tilt/Gravity
• Magnetometer – Direction
• MapKit – Embedded maps
• CoreLocation – GPS
• CoreGraphics – High level graphics
• CoreAnimations – High level animations
• OpenGL ES – 3D graphics

Introduction to iPhone Development – Slides and Demo Code

Evolve Your Code Using Extension Methods, Fluent Interfaces and Expressions

Presenter: Jonathan Birkholz
This presentation thoroughly covered the topics of Extension Methods, Lambda Expressions and Fluent Interfaces.

Points explored

• Extension Methods – Methods added to existing types. They are static methods, but called as if they were instance methods.
• Lambda Expressions – Anonymous functions that can contain expressions and statements.
• Expression Trees – Representation of language level code in the form of data.
• Expression Tree Visualizer – working implementation of a visualizer that can be run inside the Visual Studio debugger to view the contents of an expression tree.
• Fluent Interfaces – Way of implementing an object oriented API (DSL) in a way that provides more readable code.
• Single Responsibility Principle – A class should have 1 and only 1 reason to change.

Tools discussed

• StructureMap – Dependancy Injection/Inversion of Control tool
• Fluent nHibernate – Fluent, XML-less, compile safe, automated,  convention-based mappings for NHibernate.
• AutoMapper – A convention-based object-object mapper.
• NBuilder – Tool for rapidly creating test data. I am really interested in this tool…

Evolve Your Code – Slides and Demo Code

Developer <T>: Utilizing .Net Generics to Write Better Code

Presenter: Shawn Weisfeld
This presentation provided a great overview of .NET Generics.

Generics are basically type-safe data structures that do not commit to a data type. This feature was introduced in .NET Framework 2.0/Visual Studio 2005.

Other points covered

• Generic Contraints
• Generic Lists
• Generic Structs
• Generic Guidelines
• Performance

Resources provided

• Teach Yourself Visual C# 2010 in 24 Hours
• An Introduction to C# Generics
• Professional .NET 2.0 Generics

Utilizing .NET Generics to Write Better Code – Slides and Demo Code

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Materials for all the sessions are being posted to the TechFest 2009 Content site.

The 2009 Houston TechFest was a great day of learning and I am already looking forward to next year. As always, the swag was pretty nice too.

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Until next time…