For the last two days I was attending the .NET Developers Poland conference in Warsaw. It was my first time at this conference (I was there as a media patronage from dotnetomaniak.pl) and due to the fact that this year I’ve attend a lot of different sort of conferences (considering my usual average of 1/yr) I’ve decided to write short review about it. So here are the session I’ve attended

C#: Open, Evolving, Everywhere – Jon Skeet

This was a bit of a strange session. It supposted to be a keynote and started like that. Jon talked about his love relationship with C# throught the years. It was quite and enjoying one until it went about the usage of C# in the shed for steering light (the everywhere part). It was quite strange one. But then he jumped to C# 7 and it was good again but it was not a keynote-y material.
My rating 3/5

Pros: C# 7 code (in fact the talk in the voting app it was called C# 7)
Cons: the shed part 🙂

Tackling Complexities and Mediating Hexagonal Challenges – Valdis Iljuconoks

Very technical session about hexagonal architecture and mediator patter. Examples showing how those two can be combined together in order to create extensible yet closed (open/closed prinicle from SOLID) systems.

My rating: 3/5
Pros: code, code, code 🙂
Cons: a bit too slow paced for me

Busy .NET Developers’ Guide to Task Parallel Library – Ted Neward

Drugin this talk I felt like Ted Neward had just learned about TPL and this is something new and shiny for him. Well it’s now new. It’s old :). Also I was expecting more guts from a 300 session and I only saw some code on the slides. In fact, mybe the rating was wrong, as again in the voting system it was marked as a 200 session. For me, a 300 session should have a bit more than a bunch of slides with TPL code and an info that it’s hard. I know it’s hard – thank you very much Ted 🙂
My rating: 2/5

Pros: Ted’s speaking skills made this talk bearable. Kudos for that.
Cons: not technical enough

Dependency Injection: Revisit – Valdis Iljuconoks

A second session form the same speaker as the session about Hexagonal architecture. This time a depenedcy injection patterns were revistited and discussed. Few patterns were examined and explained with their strong and weak parts. Quite a good session.
My rating: 4/5

Pros: code
Cons: again a bit slow-paced (IMHO)

After the last regular talk of the day – I’ve quickly jumped to WG.NET meeting to listen to a talk about RevDebug – a debbuger that you can use to go back in time and inspect stack traces, variables, threads and more as they were during the time. Quite a nice talk! Go check this out if you haven’t seen it yet!

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Day 2

Abusing C# – Jon Skeet

OMG! The best (ex-aequo) session of the conference. There was, what we developers like – ‘meat’ (pl. ‘mięcho’). It started really slow with some async/await examples and I almost started thinking where’s the abuse part is but it moved to that part really quickly. There were some examples of abuse usage of operators overloads and strange behaviors of readonly modifier. Really, really enjoing this one. Highly recommended. The demo code can be found here: https://github.com/jskeet/DemoCode/tree/master/Abusing%20CSharp/Code
My rating: 5/5

Pros: everything!
Cons: none, just give me more of this

Entity Framework Core – Tomas Herceg

Nice session about Entiti Framework Core. Honestly I’m not into this whole ‘-Core’ new trend so I wanted to get some insights. As I see it it might be something big some day but for now it just lacks most of the features. Anyway it was quite a nice session to get some grasp on the topic.
My rating: 4/5

Pros: code
Cons: some demo issues

Busy Developers’ Guide to Garbage Collaction – Ted Neward

Ok, after the first not so good (IMO) session from Ted, I gave him a second chance. Session about Garbage Collector – and intersting topic to me. But again – I might have too high expectations about this one or maybe I already know too much? Not much new things dustin the session. The session was basicly about different types of grabage collectors presented with very entertaining way. Again Ted has shown that he’s a very skilled presenter.
My rating: 3/5

Pros: topic & Ted’s speaking skills
Cons: not much new things 🙁

Immutability – Jon Skeet

Third session by Jon Skeet during the conference. Better than the first one and almost as good as the second. Jon showed some demos about immutable stuff. You could learn what kinds of immutability are there, what are the challenges and possible solutions. Also he mentioned what we should look out for when implementing immutable types in our code.
My rating: 4/5

Pros: code
Cons: also a bit too short – 10-15 minutes more would be ideal

Ted Neward – Rethinking Enterprise

OMG! Also the best session of the conference. So I gave Ted a third chance – hey, let’s live dangerously and at the begining of this talk I was starting to regret my decision but then it all started to happen. I think this talk was Ted’s masterpiece. Both the content and his stage skills was at his best (I guess) and he delivered very energetic, funny and memorable closing talk of the conference. Might be very good for a keynote session as well.
My rating: 5/5

Pros: interesting view on software, enterprise, eye-opener
Cons: none

I really miss that the session about Debugger by Beata Zalewa was cancelled due to her sicknes. I was really looking forward to this one. Maybe next time.

In general

Pros:
– session – esspecialy on day two
– rooms close to each other so that if you wanted to change it was easy to do

Cons:
– registration issues!!! (organizers already aware of them)
– sound was poor in room 1
– the main screen in room 1 had some glitches
– it was a bit too loud during the session due to sponsors booths
– the last session was a bit longer and people could not stay for the whole raffle

So in general – few things to fix, a bit better session’s levels estimations and please change how we register at the venue. My rating: 3/5.