DevReach 2007, Sofia, Bulgaria (Day 2)

Just a few quick notes about the session I visited in the Day 2 of DevReach.

Why Partial Rendering Is Not AJAX
by Dino Esposito, Level 300

Another excellent talk by Dino. I finally cleared some misconceptions in my head about AJAX, partial rendering, update panels and all this stuff. This was a practical talk that will help me a lot when I do AJAX again (the first attempt was a bit unsuccessful, but you know AJAX is not for the faint-hearted).

Silverlight, Flash on Steroids
by Lino Tadros, Level 200

An excellent talk, by an honest and humorous speaker. Lino's SL demo app was simple and well chosen. But Silverlight is still nor ready for prime time, since the tools are lacking and there are some basic controls missing etc.. (well, when 1.1 is ready, I might take a look at it again).

Being Smart About Database Design
by Vladi Tchalkov, Level 300

Very interesting talk about database design considerations: normalization, domain tables, keys, temporal tables, optimizations. One of the concepts I found very useful was one idea of how to implement temporal tables with a single table for the whole DB. One repeating thread in the talk was "know the rules so that you know how to break them properly".

RSS, Podcasting, and Syndication
by Carl Franklin, Level 200

A nice talk by the .NET Rocks host Carl Franklin. I learned about the Argotic .NET library. And Carl was very proud that his .NET rocks feed was valid, while the NY times was not (see FeedValidator) :)

LINQ - Deep Dive
by Branimir Giurov, Level 400

Branimir covered in detail all types of LINQ (for objects, datasets, SQL, Entities, XML). He showed the cool debugging support. Good stuff, looking forward to using LINQ.

A Busy Developer's Guide to Building Windows PowerShell Cmdlets
by Hristo Deshev, Level 200

My friend Hristo gave a very interesting talk about PowerShell Cmdlets (he is also writing a book on PowerShell, so he knows his stuff). Those Cmdlets are very fast to build and really powerful. I would like to play with them in case I have to do BAT commands or something more complex.