I’m back in Melbourne after 9 days on the road for Tech Ed New Zealand and Tech Ed Sydney. I had a great time, meet lots of interesting people and had many great conversations. I’ve already blogged about my Silverlight session, and all the content is now available online. Thanks to everyone who came to the session, and for the good evaluations.

Microsoft New Zealand have also published a lot of content on their Tech Ed Live site, and you can now watch my full Silverlight session online. So if you missed the session, or want the full story behind the Dive Log sample I recommend checking out the video.

In addition to my Silverlight session I also sat on a “the next 18 months - the future of the web” panel. Suzanne Tindal from ZDNet picked up some of the discussion around JavaScript and has written an article questioning if Chrome’s JavaScript poses a challenge to Silverlight. On the panel we started talking about how JavaScript is getting faster and faster, and how Chrome is upping the performance bar with its JIT compilation and JavaScript Virtual Machine. I got quoted several places in the article, which is really cool. As most of you guys who read my blog know I’m deeply into Silverlight and I have no doubt that it’s going to be an important technology in the years to come. That being said I do think that JavaScript will turn out to be a bigger competitor to Silverlight than Flash for developers deciding which technology to use for their rich Internet applications.

The ZDNet article is well written and should be an interesting read if you want to learn more about mine, Scott Hanselman and Harry Piersons perspectives on the future of JavaScript, web applications and Silverlight. The ZDNet  article also got cross posted on CNet. Paul Glazowski followed up with a new article about Silverlight battling Flash AND JavaScript over at at BuzzYa and Mashable.

With Tech Ed ANZ now being history the next big event is the Microsoft PDC conference in LA in October. I’m going and hope to see many of you guys there!

Earlier today I gave my “Silverlight 2 for Developers” talk at TechEd New Zealand. I know the title is a little bit vague, but the session was generally trying to give developers who want to build “real applications” a good starting point. It’s a level 300 talk (advanced), so it skips the basic introduction. That being said you don’t need to be a Silverlight expert to find the session useful. The talk covered things like CRUD applications using WCF, how to implement a Presentation Model/ViewModel, how to use IoC and DI in Silverlight, and how to do unit testing in Silverlight.

The theme of the talk was diving, and for the demos I worked on a dive log application. The application is fairly complete, and I’ve made it available online for anyone to play with. The code should also be a good sample application for anyone who wants to get into building data centric Silverlight applications. I’m planning on building on the dive log sample in future blog posts, and already have several ideas in the pipeline.

You can run the application by clicking the screenshot. You will be asked to login, and any username and password will be valid. If the user doesn’t exist it will be created when you login. You can even run the unit tests directly from your browser if you want.

Slides

I've uploaded the slides to Slide Share, or you can download the full presentation from my Sky Drive.

Links and resources

Unit Testing in Silverlight

• Unit Testing with Silverlight 2 by Jeff Wilcox
  Jeff is the primary developer on the Silverlight testing framework, and this is probably the best introduction to Silverlight Unit Testing.
• Unit testing templates for Microsoft Silverlight 2 Beta 2
  To make things easier Jeff has prepared a Visual Studio template to set up Silverlight Unit Testing.
• What's in the pipeline for Silverlight Test Developers
  Jeff hints about what might come in the next version of the Silverlight testing framework.
• Unit Testing Asynchronous Code in Silverlight
  This is a post I did back in June describing how to use the Asynchronous attribute, and how to write asynchronous tests in Silverlight.
• Silverlight NUnit Projects
  Jamie Cansdale explains how to use NUnit to do Silverlight testing. The benefit of using NUnit is that you can run your tests outside the browser, execute the tests from TestDriven.Net, and even get code coverage. For integration testing (network, browser integration) you still need to use the Silverlight Testing Framework from Microsoft.
• White - Windows Application Automation
  Open source framework to automate and test Win32, Windows Forms, WPF and Java. Since Silverlight supports the same UI Automation API as WPF you should be able to use this framework to test Silverlight applications as well.

Presentation Model / View Model

• ViewModel Pattern in Silverlight using Behaviors
  Nikhil Kothari introduces the ViewModel pattern in a Silverlight context. He also shows how to add declarative behaviors to Silverlight controls to get decoupled events.
• ViewModel Pattern extended with the Dynamic Language Runtime
  In this post Nikhil extends his ViewModel example and use the dynamic language runtime to get an even more elegant way of adding behaviors to Silverlight controls.
• Presentation Model
  Fowlers essay describing the Presentation Model pattern. In essence this is the same pattern as the Model-View-ViewModel pattern, but not in a Silverlight/WPF specific context.
• YouCard Re-visited: Implementing the ViewModel pattern
  In this post I describe how I refactored the YouCard application to use the ViewModel pattern.
• PIXEL8 Pod Cast - John Gossman Architects WPF
  In this post cast John discusses the value of the Model-View-ViewModel design pattern, one of the patterns used when designing Expression Blend.

Dependency Injection

• Ninject: Lightning-fast dependency injection for .NET
  One of the cool things about Ninject is the great landing page for the project. It gives you easy access to download links, tutorials, the coding dojo and the discussion board. It's a really easy framework to get started with.
• List of .NET Dependency Injection Containers (IoC)
  Scott Hanselman has assembled a list of .NET IoC containers, and gives a brief description of each of them.
• YouCard Re-visited: Implementing Dependency Injection in Silverlight
  In this post I describe how I added dependency injection to the YouCard application using Ninject.

The session catalog for Tech Ed Australia and Tech Ed New Zealand has been available online for a few weeks now, but I haven’t gotten around to blog about me speaking at TechEd. I will be speaking about “Silverlight 2 for Developers”, as well as sitting on a panel discussing “Web Futures - the next 18 months”. The panel will also be comprised of Scott Hanselman, Nigel Parker, and Trent Mankelow. In Sydney I have a 10 minute quest appearance in the Visual Studio track showing my favorite .NET 3.5 SP1 feature.

The abstract for my Silverlight talk goes like this:

Silverlight 2 enables you to build some stunning web applications. But it's not all about eye candy. Silverlight 2 brings the power of .NET to the browser. This requires some new thinking in the way we build web applications. In this session we will focus on Silverlight 2 from a developer's point of view. This session will show you how to write code that both you and your designers can work with, by separating out business- and data access logic and leveraging the power of data binding in Silverlight. The session will also cover development practices such as unit testing and continuous integration, as well as more technical topics such as network- and data access, local storage and more. You will also learn a few tips on how you as a developer can leverage Blend 2.5

As you can see by the description I don’t want the session to be yet another “introduction to Silverlight 2” presentation. I will cover concrete things such as how to build a data driven CRUD application in Silverlight, talking to web services and using features like data binding and the visual state manager. However, I also want to cover design patterns and development practices that can help you build more flexible, testable and designable (as in UI design) code.

The day before Tech Ed the New Zealand development community is putting together Auckland Code Camp 2008. Since I’m in town I got invited to do a presentation, and I had such good time at CodeCampOZ earlier this year that I couldn’t say no to that invitation. Robert Fonseca-Ensor is doing a TDD and DI/IoC talk in the morning, so I will use part of my session to build on that and show how to use Ninject to do dependency injection in Silverlight 2. I will also cover some more advanced Silverlight 2 testing scenarios, such as writing asynchronous tests, before finishing up with some HTML Bridge fun.

Tech Ed New Zealand, Auckland (1– 3 September 2008)

WEB304 - Web Futures - the next 18 months (02/09/2008 10:45AM-12:00PM)
Where is the web going over the next 18 months and what is in the pipeline from Microsoft to cater for and drive this? Is Microsoft up to the challenge? How is Microsoft working with the part of the web that is not MS based? How is Microsoft changing to cater for emerging trends? Submit your questions and hear the answers from the experts.

WEB309 - Silverlight 2 for developers (03/09/2008 9:00AM-10:15AM)
See description above...

Tech Ed Australia, Sydney (2 – 5 September 2008)

WEB309 - Silverlight 2 for developers (04/09/2008 8:30AM-9:45AM )
See description above...

WEB304 - Web Futures - the next 18 months (05/09/2008 10:15AM-11:30AM)
See description above...

DEV210 - The Hour of Power: 6 of the Best - Best of the Best in VS2008, Fx 3.5 inc SP1 (05/09/2008 8:30AM-9:45AM)
Rock on up to the “Hour of Power” this will be a fun energy packed session presented by 6 speakers each speaking for 10 minutes on their favourite feature(s) in Visual Studio 2008 and Fx 3.5 including SP1. It’s a must see session and a great way to pick up a few new tips and tricks!!

Going to TechEd Australia or New Zealand? Or got any questions, suggestions or ideas to things you want me to cover? If so, it would be awesome if you drop me a comment.

As I mentioned in my first post Hege and I spent the weekend in Barcelona which was great. We went and saw the Barcelona - Real Batis game. What an experience! Ronaldinio scored two amazing free kick goals, Real Batis didn't stand a chance. Anyway, TechEd is halfway through and so far the event have been great. The keynote didn't have too many big announcements, but at least we know that VS2008 will ship (online) by the end of this month, so it's really really close guys! The coolest part of the key note demo was Dan Fernandez showing how they've used the Visual Studio Shell to build a custom IDE to create World of Warcraft plugins, with a custom UI designer and full intellisense for the WOW script language.  Awesome stuff! I also attended Dan's talk on Popfly which also was really enjoyable.

I've been dropping in on various sessions related to the things I'll cover in my Web 2.0 event in Oslo November 20, and in 20min I'm going to the "WCF and the Web: AJAX, REST and Syndication Services in Web 2.0 with .NET 3.5" session. This is exactly some of the things I'll cover in my talk in Oslo, so figured I'd drop by to see if I can pick up some tricks to show you…

The "Silverlight, ASP.NET and Web Services in IronPython and IronRuby" was another really interesting sessions. It's amazing how far the IronPython project have come, and I really hope I can apply dynamic programming in a work related project in a not to far distant future. Dynamic languages on top of the CLR enables some really powerful scenarios, and I also think that these new sets of languages are going to attract new developers to the platform…

Edgar Stokka, a colleague from Capgemini Stavanger, have created a dedicated TechEd 2007 blog over at http://techedgar.blogspot.com where he have posted about his impressions of the event, and a bunch of pictures. So for more impressions of TechEd Barcelona head over to his site.

It's Monday night and I'm safely back home in Trondheim. I've spent the weekend recovering from a really exiting but still tiresome TechEd week in Barcelona.

Wednesday was all about interviews and demos. Early Wednesday Simon Brown and Arfa (that 11 year old Pakistan girl from the key note) dropped by our stand and asked for an Imagine Cup demo. Arfa was really interested in the project, but most of all she wanted to compete in the Imagine Cup her self, even tough she have to wait four more years till she turns 16…

During the day we gave three video interviews, one with Virtual TechEd, one with my mate Dave McMahon and finally a Channel9 interview. I'll post links as soon as the interviews are available online. Just after the Channel9 interview Anders Hejlsberg dropped by the Imagine Cup stand to check out our and the Italian project. Me and Hans Olav got a chance to give him the demo, and talk to him about technologies used to implement the project, Anders sessions at TechEd and LINQ. It was great to get a chance to meet Anders and chat with him.

Wednesday evening was all about the infamous, annual Norwegian TechEd party at the Hard Rock Cafe. More than 200 Norwegian delegates where attending TechEd this year, and the Norwegian party is know for being the best TechEd party, so quite a few speakers dropped by as well. As you can imagine, the place was quite crowded and the atmosphere was great!

Thursday was the "Microsoft Student Partner Program" day. 120 students from around the EMEA region was invited to attend TechEd during the day. Henrik, the Danish academic evangelist, was also in Barcelona, so it was fun seeing him again. Thursday after noon Caroline Phillips officially announced the Microsoft Student Partner Program at the first EMEA MSP meeting. During the meeting we gave a 25 minute presentation talking about our Imagine Cup project and most importantly the experience in India during the world finals.

After the meeting all 120 MSP, all the ADE's and a couple of other Microsoft people went over to "Lasermon" which has Barcelona's largest laser gun arena. We played laser death match, had all kinds of Spanish food and plenty of drinks. It was great to meet students from around the EMEA region and talk about how they run their local student community user groups.

During the party I also got a chance to catch up with Rob Burke from Microsoft Ireland. He's a really great guy, and has a really god blog up at http://blogs.msdn.com/robburke, and is allso a frequent Flickr poster.

Our flight back to Norway left Friday after noon, so we didn't have time to attend TechEd Friday. It was nice to get home Friday afternoon and have the weekend to recover  after TechEd.

As you can imagine after reading the posts TechEd this year was really busy for us. I didn't get a chance to attend as many sessions as I wanted, but then again we will be receiving the TechEd post conference DVD with all the sessions. You can cream all the great content into one DVD, but you cant capture the true atmosphere and all the people you meet at TechEd into one DVD. You'll have to be there your self.

Finally, a big shout out to everyone I meet during the TechEd week, and special thanks to Caroline for inviting us.

Oh, by the way, Hege and Caroline have uploaded a bunch of pictures on their Flickr sites. Be sure to check them out.

PS. I installed Office 2007 RTM today. Worked like a charm! Some really cool new features in OneNote 2007 I'll blog about later.

PPS: I have lots of great ideas after TechEd, just need time to put them in motion. One of the things I'm currently playing with involves IQueriable<T>… More to come on this one…

I'm currently attending the Microsoft TechEd Developers in Barcelona. Me and Hege arrived Friday at noon, so we speed the weekend as tourists Barcelona with Gøran and Astrid, who arrived Thursday noon. During the weekend we've visited some of Gaudis famous buildings, such as Sagrada Familia and Casa Milà. We spend Saturday trawling the shops down town in the Larabla street. Lots of fun for the girls, horrible for my feet…

We spent Sunday checking out the Zoo, which was tons of fun, even though the famous albino gorilla Snowflake passed away a few years ago. We saw all kinds of crazy animals and Hege took a ton of pictures that probably will be available on Flickr once we get back to Trondheim. On the evening we visited the Aquarium where they had a 70m under water tunnel with sharks and all kinds of other big fishes.

Monday was the first day of TechEd. Well, actually Monday it's the pre-conference day. I attended the first two parts of the architecture track held by Ron Jacobs and Scott Hanselman. I had to leave before they got really deep into the material, but Ron gave some interesting "stories" about the different role of an architect. As an explorer, designer and advocate. Scott gave some concrete tips on how to measure and plan for security, scalability, performance and availability. Interesting in deed.

I had to leave after the two first parts of the pre-conference track for the RD meeting. Great to finally meat many of my fellow RDs in person. During the meeting the winners of the photo contest where announced. And guess what; I won! Big thanks to the photographer Hege. The first price was an Xbox 360 and a Zune Player (once available). So that was tons of fun. After the meeting we had an RD party down town Barcelona. The food was excellent, and I had squid fish for the first time!

Today, Tuesday, was the real opening day of TechEd. During the morning key note the Norwegian team and our project was mentioned, in front of approx 3500 developers. Awesome! The key note was pretty much what you can expect from an key note like this. Some cool end to end scenarios on how to use .NET 3.0, Windows Vista and Office 2007 to build new business solutions. Anders Hejlsberg did his LINQ magic, which continues to blow me away by it's power and elegance. This is definitely something I'll explore further and blog more about.

We've also been busy at the Imagine Cup stand, where we've been demoing MediWatch for press, developers and other interested people. I also took part in a "press round table" discussing "young developers of the future". The theme for the discussion was some of the challenges for young developers, which part universities should play in providing the students with the skill set needed in the "real world", and how universities and companies could encourage more young students to learn information technology and go on to become entrepreneurs them self.

All in all the first half of my Barcelona stay has been a blast, and there is so much more to come. Lots of great sessions to attend, and fun parties to be at. Tomorrow is the Norwegian party at Hard rock cafe, and Thursday is the student partner evening.

I'll be back with more. This is Jonas, reporting live from TechEd ;)