Patterns and Practices Summit 2008 - Day 5
1. John De Vos, David Hill & Ajoy Krishnamoorthy - P&P Looking ahead : These guys are the P&P architects and they wanted to know how we felt about the current set of Enterprise Library tools. They also did a bit of horn blowing by providing us with the general usage statistics for the Enterprise Library in the development community.
I made a point of standing up and stressing the importance of having StarterKits for the different Ent Lib tools. I also stressed the importance of the Astoria framework for developers that work on multi-tier applications. :-P They referred me to their "Reference Implementations". (I need to look into this.)
2. Keynote - Scott Guthrie : Scott Guthrie gave some insight into Microsoft's up and coming technologies and mentioned something that had been bothering me since toying with the ASP.NET MVC framework. ASP.NET servercontrols WILL be fully supported in ASP.NET MVC applications in ASP.NET 4.0. He did not specifically mention that "ASP.NET 4.0" but if you read between the lines, ASP.NET 4.0 will be a hybrid of the MVC framework and Webforms technologies. Naaaaiiiicccceeeee. :-)
3. Billy Hollis - Drowning in Complexity : Once again Billy's session rocked the house. He crystalized a lot of my thoughts with regards to the Agile software development methodology. I totally agree, that it's a methodology invented by "Code Addicts", and he also pointed out how we...(us developers) and the general users of Microsoft's technologies are partly to blame for the complexity issues we face today due to our "Feature Hungry Mentality". Apple has managed to avoid this trap by building simple and easy to use devices like the iPhone and iPod. The key to their success lies in their simple and intuitive design.