DevConnections Update

One of my favorite sessions was titled, “Technical Debt”. It was particularly interesting to me because I’m directly involved in decisions about building vs. buying technology. It’s been my experience that any good IT manager considers these decisions carefully, and promotes building an infrastructure consisting of both in-house solutions and 3rd party applications and controls.

I’ve also attended several sessions where MVVM architecture, and several variations (like MVP), were discussed. I need to spend time now, evaluating where applications can be re-architected to make them easier to test and maintain.

Naturally, cloud computing was a big focus. Appliances, or pre-loaded and configured hardware and software application boxes, we discussed. Also, some upcoming features of the next release of SQL Server we announced. Column indexing, which allows physically storing columns of a table separately on disc was one of my favorites. Storing specific columns of a table separately causes dramatic reduction in i/o when the columns are specifically selected – and queries can run dramatically faster.

I was also happy to hear that developing web forms applications can have improved performance if they are done correctly – and if the developer understands what’s going on behind the scenes. If a web forms developer approaches the project correctly, the benefits of developing with web forms can outweigh the potential performance hits, and make web forms a very real and viable choice for enterprise development.

Of course, LightSwitch and WebMatrix got their share of the spotlight. Microsoft of doing a good job of positioning .NET as the platform for developers of all levels and all camps. From what I can see, the future of development with .NET looks great!