DevConnections 2011 Recap

I had the pleasure of accompanying the ComponentOne team to Las Vegas this time for the DevConnections conference at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. This was my second time in Vegas, with the first time being for the MIX conference back in April. This was also my first DevConnections, so I think it’s interesting to point out how this conference differs from my previous experiences in the same place. The Expo Hall is where I spent a majority of my time. This was decently larger from other conferences I’ve attended, and I feel there was a great presence of attendees. The ComponentOne team welcomed everyone that came around, and we hope that we were able to answer any questions folks might had had. There was a ton of interest in ASP.NET Wijmo, Studio for Silverlight, and Studio for SharePoint. In fact, ASP.NET Wijmo was a finalist for the Best of DevConnections in the ASP.NET/Silverlight category. Sadly, we were not the winners of the prize, but I believe that is due to the unfairness of the category. ASP.NET Wijmo is a HTML5 solution, and is the best on the market. The winner was a Silverlight based product. The DevConnections team should consider splitting the category to allow for a more apples to apples comparison. And really… Silverlight is dead, right? I had the opportunity to sit in several talks at DevConnections. The first talk was between John Papa and Dan Wahlin. They discussed JavaScript design patterns for better organization of code. John and Dan did a wonderful job of walking through the demos, and showing WHY their patterns were a better way for writing JavaScript. In fact, I have a current project where I’m already pulling in the ‘Revealing Module Pattern’ to make the code more DRY and modular. The second talk I attended as Dan Wahlin’s “Account at a Glance” discussion. This was a good sequel to the first talk since Dan showed the patterns in production. The Account at a Glance application is freely available to download, and I recommend everyone does. It incorporates several newer technologies and shows them working together in harmony. Third, I attended Todd Anglin's “LESS for CSS” talk. LESS is a pretty cool idea, and it’s spawned some debate amongst my coworkers. I understand the idea that LESS is trying to solve. It makes CSS easier to write my introducing basic programming constructs such as variable, functions, etc. There are even great add ins for IDEs to make this process seamless. The issue I see with LESS though is that client-side debugging could be LESS (excuse the pun) than perfect. Imagine you have a huge production site written with LESS, and you need to debug styling issues within one of the generated files. Instead of just fixing the CSS file, you have to go into the LESS files and make the changes and hope for different generated output. But like any technology, it’s new and fresh. The tools need to catch up with it to make it a more viable option. I attended a couple other sessions, but they did not stand out in the way I would have expected them too. It would be nice to see more variety in speakers and content from this conference. Overall, I really enjoyed the DevConnection conference. I spent valuable time with my awesome coworkers that I don’t normally get. I met tons of new people, and I was able to grow more relationships because of my time here. I am greatly looking forward to my next DevConnections opportunity. Kevin Griffin KevinG@ComponentOne.com Follow Me on Twitter