November had a lot of online conferences and events for a .NET developer! During these events, we got an upgrade to our favorite IDE, Visual Studio — and new versions of .NET and C#. Below are some of my notes about these conferences.
.NET Conf 2021 (Nov 9-11)
Here’s a link to the official website for the conference. This was, by far, the best conference of the year for me. Tons of sessions were focused on either code or on the tools that help you code. This conference included the official launch announcements for .NET 6 and C# 10. Several sessions highlighted the new features in newly launched Visual Studio 2022. There were two days of sessions from Microsoft presenters – followed by a marathon of community presentations streaming nonstop in back-to-back 30 minute sessions. Session replays are available on YouTube. People were responding on Twitter.
They gave away both physical and digital swag kits to attendees. My conf swag arrived in the mail. Thank you organizers! There were a few contests, and some awesome prizes (like a $500 Amazon gift card). They were fun to play. Most of the contests were live trivia questions. One of the contests involved solving about 10 puzzles to find “hidden letters” and then rearranging the letter to make a “secret phrase.” It was actually really hard to complete. Another item was a free issue of CODE magazine.
Visual Studio 2022 launch (Nov 8)
Some of my favorite new features are: smarter Intellicode, hot reload, and writing less boilerplate code. The official launch video (30 minutes) is worth a watch because they quickly go through the most exciting new features – so much content that it felt like a 2 hour video! For a slightly deeper dive, watch the Visual Studio 2022 Tips & Tricks. These shorter videos are broken down by feature and give many useful demos that help you learn how to use VS2022 better.
Microsoft Ignite 2021 (Nov 2-3)
Microsoft made some effective tools to encourage attendees to promote this conference. Their “Create” tool was fun. I made a picture and a fun video. The kids loved the video.
This conference didn’t give me much as a developer. It felt like a lot of corporate-level marketing, both Microsoft selling their apps to corporations as well as their corporate partners marketing themselves. I’m pretty used to this culture because I’ve been seeing it my whole career. Honestly, I multitasked while I listened to the presentations in the background. Again, this was mostly a one-way event. You watch the presentations, and maybe ask questions of the presenters, however there is limited ability for attendees to interact.
Some session notes:
- Scott Guthrie’s presentation Innovate Anywhere From Multicloud to Edge included some dev tools, like GitHub Codespaces and Copilot.
- Cecil Phillip’s session Programming Essentials for Beginners was streamed with Teams on a webpage. One very interesting thing is that this *very* beginner session was given in Python, not C#. It was too basic for me, and not focused on C#, so I left the meeting. However, the presenter was good.
- Mark Brown & Gary Hope – Model and Partition your Data in Azure Cosmos DB (also an CosmosDB announcement was posted) – this was a good presentation, gave technical details and discussed CosmosDB data architecture choices and implications. They give a good introduction to CosmosDB, when coming from SQL Server background. One of the attendees advertised this free basic Azure course. There are few job postings for CosmosDB on Indeed. For my career, I’ll focus on SQL Server first
- On demand talk, Green Transformation: driving measurable sustainability every step of the way – my favorite part of this session was their slide on Reduce, Reuse & Recycle (at 12:10 of the recorded session).
- Ana Inés Urrutia de Souza – We rise by lifting others: Boost your career through community and mentorship – this was a helpful session about mentoring with some solid action items.
DDD 2021 (Nov 27)
Developer! Developer! Developer! Day – a one day conference in the UK, on November 27. It had a lot of online sessions that looked good. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend because it was scheduled at the same time as my partner’s birthday party. This year, I had a great time celebrating with family, and hope to be able to virtually attend the next DDD. Recordings were not available to watch online, so I don’t have much more to say about this conference.
