DevBlog

The final day of DevLink started pretty much the same way as Day 2?a trip to McDonald?s for breakfast and a car full of attendees.

Pure T-SQL Code

I wasn?t sure which session to attend first thing. Nothing really jumped out at me. I finally decided on ?Pure T-SQL Code? by Paul Nielsen for a couple of reasons. First, I had been following Paul on Twitter for a while. Second, I met him this past Spring at the MVP Summit. Third, my session followed his in the same room.

Paul is a very personable speaker. Right away he makes you feel like an old friend. I don?t write much TSQL in my job and some of the stuff he was doing was more complex than the simple scripts I write, but he was using real world examples that he?s written in his own applications. And you can get the same info. Pick up Paul?s book, SQL Server Bible. It?s all in there?and then some.

I also talked to Paul about coming to Salt Lake City next month for the Utah Code Camp. I hope he does. Great session.

Architecting Modern Distributed Applications

After Paul?s session, I did my ?Domain Driven Design for the Average Application? session, then it was lunch. The first session of the afternoon was ?Architecting Modern Distributed Applications? by Clint Edmondson.

There are a number of trends in distributed applications

• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• Software As A Service (SaaS)
• Web 2.0
• Rich Internet Applications (RIA)
• Cloud Computing

Each one of these has different strengths and weaknesses. How we choose one over another depends on what we need to accomplish. Clint then showed a number of slides that showed a path from one technology to another to show how we choose the technologies to use.

Understanding User Experience Design Patterns

Jason Beres of Infragistics did the next session, ?Understanding User Experience Design Patterns?. Working for a company that creates user interface controls gives him a unique perspective into how users work and what Ux they expect.

We can look at everyday things to figure out how usable they are. Jason showed some examples of good and bad Ux of both software and real things.

He showed some Ux patterns that we used based on how the user will use the software. These are all listed on a great patterns site called Quince.

.NET Rocks, Live!

One of the great .NET podcasts is .NET Rocks. Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell do an incredible job of getting guests, asking them the right questions, and entertaining us at the same time. The closing session of the conference was a panel discussion on the topic of ?Is Software Development Getting Too Complex?. On the panel was Billy Hollis, Kathleen Dollard, Josh Holmes, and Jim Holmes. The discussion was recorded for a future episode of .NET Rocks. Watch for it to be available soon.

Epilogue

This was my first time at DevLink, but I hope it?s not my last. It was simply one of the best conferences I?ve attended. The content was second-to-none. The venue was superb. The food was tasty and healthy. The networking was great. The price was even better. Three days of geek goodness for $100. The preliminary dates for DevLink 2010 are August 5-7. After the conference, Paul Nielsen Tweeted, ?DevLink is the best tech conference in North America. Period.? That?s a great endorsement. I hope to see you at DevLink next year.

// posted by Craig Berntson @ 10:48:00 PM