TechEd Africa 2009

Sooo, as the Americans say, TechEd 2009 is done and it was all good.

Great speakers all round, the guys from HQ in Redmond really impressed me with their depth of product knowledge.

I was on the dev track so I primarily attended technical, dev related sessions.

The key things focused on were:

1> .Net 4.0 - Focusing on things like:

- The new Dynamic type
- The Entity Framework
- ADO.NET Data Services 1.5
- The new Parrallel libraries (big one in my opinion and shows lots of potential)
- And various other things that I will probably elaborate on in other posts

2> Dynamic languages- I enjoyed these lectures, these languages (F# anyone?) are really something to see in action.

3> Data access technologies from Microsoft per se, including but not exclusive to Entity Framework (enhanced in .Net 4.0) and LINQtoSQL.

4> WPF - Microsofts not so subtle attempt to phase out Winforms. Impressive in it's own right but still not a candidate for replacement of Winforms for any suffciently complex application in my opinion. .Net 4.0 does bring some nice enhancements for WPF though and it is definitely maturing and showing plenty of potential going forward. I will need to start experimenting with this soon.

5> WCF (Windows Collaboration Foundation) and WF (Work Flow): 2 things I'm not terribly familiar with yet. WF is something that is geared more towards network admins and meant for Sharepoint Portal Server integration etc., from what I could tell. WCF holds potential and some new things have been done there so I need to look into that and skill up on that, soon.

All in all, a very successful TechEd for me and I really enjoyed myself. I will be posting more on the details of the various areas mentioned above and putting together some protoypes incorporating those technologies soon, which I will post on and keep you up to date on.

Right now it's time to get back to work and deal with real world issues again.