Patterns and Practices Summit 2008 - Day 4
1. Keynote - David Treadwell: This talk focused on cloud computing and David gave a demonsration of the how a "mesh" application would work.
2. David Hill & Kyle Huntley - Composition and presentation patterns : What a brilliant talk! David and Kyle took us through a WPF/Silverlight applicaton where the only differentiation was the UI skin!!! He showed how by implementing this pattern a WPF application can be easily upgraded to a Silverlight application. The application leveraged the Unity framework.
3. Rocky Lhotka - Porting CSLA to Silverlight: Rocky gave an overview of the CSLA framework. I agree with Rocky's general outlook on software design, but I felt he was very vague on how CSLA can be implemented and used. Personally I think he was trying to avoid making his talk sound like a sales pitch.
4. Drew Miller - Distributed caching : This was a very good talk on Distributed caching in multi-tier and web farm scenarios. It's worth investigating Velocity by Microsoft and MemCache. There are some good webcasts on Velocity that can be found here.
5. Erwin Van Der Valk - Presentation Layer Anti-Patterns: Erwin gave a good talk about the challenges that face UI developers, and and some insight into his experiences during his career.
6. Ward Bell - Lessons in Data Driven Silverlight Applications : Ward demonstrated a Silverlight application that performed the basic CRUD and included security membership features. He also stressed that developing in Silverlight would mean that the developer would have to adopt the "Asynchronous" mindset.