This week was my second visit to DevConnections and first as a speaker. Two years ago, the event was much larger and more spread out across the Mandalay Bay Conference Center in Las Vegas. I enjoyed the conference back then and I enjoyed the conference this year, as well. The content was intriguing, the speaker pool was excellent, the venue was first-rate, and the atmosphere was great.

Because I was a speaker and because I was presenting 2 brand new presentations, I spent the first day in the speaker room preparing my talks. This strategy seemed to work as several people came up to me after my session and during the conference to tell me they enjoyed my sessions.

After my preparation was done, I was able to attend some sessions on Creating Windows 8 Games, Windows Azure, TypeScript, and Do’s and Don'ts of Software Development.

The conference attracted a diverse group of speakers from all over the world and attendees from all over the US. At lunch one day, I met the guy who wrote the online ordering application I use to order my lunch. In the speaker room, I met people from Israel, Italy, and all across the US.

You can download my slides and demos below:
Connecting the Dots: Using Web API, jQuery, and HTML5 Together http://sdrv.ms/1e15q3P
Maintaining Legacy Code http://sdrv.ms/1e15sZu

My notes from attending sessions are below.

Cloud Computing

Mark Minasi
Mark Russinovich

Microsoft moved from
Plan/Develop/Test/Ship
to "DevOps"

System Center Virtual Machine Manager
Windows Azure Fabric Controller

Issues of scaling

Commodity hardware in Azure data center

Redundancy
(e.g., Azure fabric controller runs on multiple servers)

Efficient data centers
2 people watching servers
2 people taking calls

Price breaks buying hardware in huge volume

Customers with global customers need cloud provider with data centers around the world
Latency

3rd Phase of Computing
1. Birth of mainframe
2. Client-server
3. Cloud computing

What happens in China?

Cloud is changing jobs - not eliminating them
Managing virtual machines/ monitoring system vs managing hardware

Building Games for Windows 8 – Using GameMaker
Daniel Egan

Step-by-step using GameMaker

Build vector graphics with Inkscape http://inkscape.org/

Keep graphics quality consistent.

Do's and Don't's of Software Projects
Dino Esposito

Big Ball of Mud (BBM)=Spaghetti Code
Not big in the beginning. Grows over time
No single developer can create BBM.

Communication is key
Misalignment btn requirements & features

When individual changes occur frequently, the system changes over time and may require a change in architecture.

Software is not like engineering: More dynamic.

Clean Code

Cohesion: Keep together logically-related methods and classes

Layers

Don't be afraid of refactoring

Tools can help