Just a brief note of today’s highlights:

Mads Torgersen on the future of C#

Listening to Mads Torgersen talk about Roslyn and some of the new additions to the C# syntax was nice – I love the fact that my trusty workhorse is keeping up and is still being improved. I would love it if F#’s discriminated unions and pattern matching would find a way into C# though.

Greg Young on event sourcing

Having been drinking a fair amount of event sourcing Kool-Aid lately :), I simply had to go to Greg Young’s talk about event sourcing. It was cool when our CQRS- and event sourcing framework got a mention from the master himself.

Mads Kristensen on ASP.NET vNext

Watching Mads Kristensen show off the new ASP.NET vNext stuff is another sign that Microsoft is doing a lot to keep up with current de facto web development toolchain standards, as they have added the concept of a “Task runner” to Visual Studio – this is where Grunt/Gulp/Mimosa/Broccoli/next week’s shiny new JavaScript task runner will pop up and become tightly integrated in our Visual Studio development flow.

Other stuff

There was probably other interesting stuff going on as well, but I must admit that my head hurts a little bit from having had one beer too many yesterday evening. But that is quite natural, actually, as going to conferences is ~50%(*) about having beers and talking to inspiring people.

(*) That claim is supported by a pretty decent amount of empirical evidence, which I have personally collected.

Moday

C# is my favorite enterprisey multi-purpose multi-paradigm language, so I simply have to watch Mads Torgerson talk about the new Roslyn-based compiler, even though my interest was slightly piqued by the Xamarin.Forms talk (mostly because my prejudice is that cross-platform mobile development does not work well, but I would love to be proven wrong!).

In the next slot, Mark Seeman is doing the interesting Look, no mocks!-talk about functional TDD with F#, which I also wanted to see, but I might end up going to one of the data talks – either Cliff Click’s Fast Analytics On Big Data-talk for some serious number-awe, or Mark Madsen’s Big Data, Bad Analogies-talk because I usually enjoy talks that add a historical perspective to something that many developers consider new and shiny.

In the 3rd slot, Greg Young will be talking about Event Sourcing, apparently, but there’s no abstract on the homepage… also, I’ve been to several of Greg’s talks about event sourcing, so I might end up going to Martin Thompson’s Responding In A Timely Manner-talk, which seems to be about latency at several levels.

In the last two slots on Monday, I have no idea where I want to go – being a .NET guy, I could go to Mads Christensen’s talk about The Future Of ASP.NET Web Tooling, but lately I’ve found myself enjoying more “general” web tooling like Bower, Mimosa, Gulp, etc. more, also for regular .NET web development, so I will probably go to either the NetflixOSS talk or the Big Data Deep Dive talk… or I might end up on a couch with my laptop, because at this point my fingers usually start to get an itch that can only be scratched by coding.

Tuesday

In the first slot on Tuesday, I think I’ll go get an update on Swift – I’ve coded a couple of hello worlds including one with draggable cookies with Swift, and I have pretty high expectations for the language, but I haven’t really followed along the last months, so it will be interesting to get an update.

In the next slot, I think I’ll go to Matias Niemelä’s talk about Enhanced Front-end Applications In Angular.js 1.3 which will probably feed me some nuggets of information that will turn out to be valuable at work.

In the third slot, I could go to Yann Cluchey’s talk about Making Enterprise Data Available in Real Time with Elasticsearch but José Valim’s Idioms for building distributed fault-tolerant applications with Elixir-talk also looks interesting – I usually enjoy seeing what tricks they’re capable of in the Erlang-world.

In the next slot, I don’t know where to go – but in the last slot, I’m fairly sure that I’ll go watch Jan Møller talk about the BitCoin protocol at the technical level because I expect it to be about distributed systems, consensus, and interesting stuff like that (which IMO is relevant knowledge for anyone who has ever done any kind of programming that involves more than one process talking…)

Wednesday

On Wednesday, I’ll be back at the d60 office, because GOTO is only two days now :'(