Niels Wouters @ Techorama 2019
Today I want to tell you about my adventure in Antwerp at Techorama 2019. I heard many great stories about Techorama in previous years, and I wanted to experience this myself. Since Digital Unity invests heavily in their consultants, they offered me an all-inclusive free ride to Techorama 2019. I happily accepted!
The first day of the conference
I arrived early on the first day because I didn’t want to get stuck in traffic. It gave me a chance to visit some of the booths when it wasn’t so crowded. Most booths gave free stuff if you came to talk and scan your Techorama ticket. After visiting some booths, it was finally time for the opening keynote.
The opening keynote was Solving Diabetes with an Open Source Artificial Pancreas by Scott Hanselman. Scott is a type 1 diabetic for over twenty years. When he first became diabetic, he did what every engineer would do. He wrote an app to solve his problem. Fast forward to 2019, and Scott lives 24 hours a day connected to an open-source artificial pancreas. After years of waiting, the diabetes online community created different solutions. He went through the history of diabetes online, the components (both hardware and software) needed for an artificial pancreas, and discussed the architectural design. It was nice to see how a small community can create life-changing open source projects to make life easier.
After this talk, I went to ASP.NET Core: The One Hour Makeover by Jon Galloway. He showed us how to start an ASP.NET Core web project and what to think about before we start. Additionally, he showed best practices to set up a project. Since I was very familiar with ASP.NET Core because of my current project for Digital Unity, they couldn’t tell me much new. But it is was well put together.
The next session, the best, in my opinion, I went to was Web Development Revolution with WebAssembly and ASP.NET Blazor by Rainer Stropek. I was interested in this talk because I was experimenting with Blazor for a few weeks before. Blazor is the new .NET and WASM-based Single-Page-App (SPA) framework, which looks very promising. Rainer Stropek showed us how to get started with Blazor, and he also talked about how it worked behind the scenes. I think Blazor is going to be the new standard for web apps in the future. But it is still in development. Blazor just became a preview project from Microsoft. This means Microsoft will actively continue developing Blazor, and will probably release it for production in 2020. You can watch the full talk on YouTube if you’re interested.
After this talk, it was time for lunch. I met up with a few people I worked with in the past and went to get food. After that, we went to some of the booths and did some catch-up talking with them.
The next talk I went to was “.NET everywhere, is it possible and is it awesome?” By Scott Hanselman. He showed us how far .NET has come and how easy it is to develop software that can run everywhere with .NET Core. He also did some demo to show how quickly you can create a program and run it on a raspberry pi and control its IO pins.
The second last talk I participated in was Break the Chain Asynchronously by Daniel Marbach. He talked about the Chain of Responsibility pattern, which is present in middleware like OWIN and ASP.NET Core. They all share a common approach: nesting functions inside functions, also known as functional composition. Afterward, he created a small project and implemented this from scratch.
After this session, it was time for What’s new in C# 8.x and beyond by Bart de Smet. He showed us the changes in the new C# 8.x version and how to use the new features. Some of the changes are the way we use using statements and switch statements. I will use some of these in my future coding.
Then it was finally time to go home. After all these sessions, I was exhausted and could use some sleep. So this was the end of day one.
The second and last day of the conference
Just like the first day, I went early to avoid traffic. It allowed me to visit some more booths and meet up with some of my friends.
The first session I attended on the second day was Microsoft, Linux, Open Source, Cloud + DevOps by Jessica Deen. She showed us how to use Visual Studio Code on Windows/Linux to create apps that can run in a container deployed to the Azure cloud. It was nice to see how many options there are and how easy it can be to create and deploy an application.
Then I went to Modernizing .NET Applications with Docker Containers by Steven Follis. Steven showed us how we can get started with Docker and how easy it is to migrate the existing .NET project to Docker containers. Docker containers make deploying easy and fast. Because you create an image from your code and operating system of choice. So you can’t say “Worked on my machine!” anymore because if it works on your machine in a container it will work everywhere.
Next up was “Code faster and better with Visual Studio 2019 by Mika Dumont“. Mika showed the new and upcoming changes to Visual Studio 2019 and how we can use them to code better and faster. I liked some of these features and started using them immediately. For example, the new Go-To search box to quickly open a file/class or the new Tests Explorer UI which gives much more information about your tests and filter functionality.
The next talk I attended was An In-Depth Look at HttpClient by Kevin Dockx. The goal of this session was to show how to use the HttpClient correctly and all its features. It was helpful because a lot of people are using HttpClient wrong, creating performance issues. I am glad I went to this session because I will use this knowledge in the future.
Now it was time for my second last session of Techorama, Writing Allocation Free Code in C# by Matt Ellis. This session was all about improving performance by using fewer allocations in the code. The recent version of C# allows using structs without creating lots of copies, and Matt showed how we can use this and how much impact it has on performance.
Then it was time to end Techorama 2019 and go to the closing keynote, Technology, and Innovation by André Kuipers. André is an astronaut and went to space two times. He stayed in a total of 204 days in space. He talked about the years of training he had to go through to be an astronaut and all the technology and innovation needed to go to space. Also, he explained what it is like living in the ISS and how different it is from here on Earth. I liked this because I am interested in space, so I enjoyed every minute of it.
This was the end of the sessions. Now all that was left was the prize raffle and closing reception with food and free drinks. Sadly I did not win anything, but I still had a good time. I am happy I could participate in Techorama this year and will do this again next year!
Thanks, Digital Unity, for allowing me to attend Techorama 2019!
