Category Archives: conferences

VSLive San Francisco 2015

I was able to attend VSLive in San Francisco this year including the Pre-Conference (yes nifty indeed) hosted at the historical Fairmont.

Here are some of my notes/observations/snotty comments:

  • Open source licenses are complicated and if you have deliverables in the enterprise you should NOT use copyleft licenses as you are legally bound to re-release under that same license your additions on top or using the original copyleft material. Focus on more Permissive licenses (like Apache, BSD, MIT) to avoid potential hassles.
  • Microsoft really, REALLY loves Azure and wants you to 100% do everything in it. It was communicated that their reasoning for Open sourcing .NET was to promote “Any Developer, Any App on Any Device” – of course all using Azure offerings.
  • PowerShell was a reoccurring theme across sessions from deployments to testing.
  • San Francisco is a wickedly expensive place to visit. When the locals say “oh its only four blocks” be warned those four blocks are likely at 45° inclines and are meant to weed out the weak.
  • It appears to me that most of the attendees don’t keep up during the year and use these conferences to catch up. My personal reason was to re-enforce that what I have learned and practiced on the technologies covered are correct and optimal. I can honestly say that about 80% of the material covered was review.
  • I think its interesting how most developer types are very anti-social and these conferences continually try to “socialize” these sorts together. What winds up happening more often than not is groups of geeks sitting at a lunch table not a single person saying anything; absolute awkward silence. I attempt start up conversations and they usually end with a single “yep” or “nope” type response.

Notable Quotes from Sessions:

  • “Trading velocity for quality will lead to technical debt” – Hundhausen
  • “Routinely have a HARD Conversation with shareholders – Honest, Appropriate, Respectful and Direct” – Hundhausen
  • “Always follow the Boy Scout Rule; leave your code better than you found it” – Hundhausen

List of the sessions I attended:

  • Pre-Conference: ALM and DevOps with the Microsoft Stack – Brain Randell
  • Keynote: The Future of Application Development – Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 2015 – Jay Schmelzer
  • UX Design Principle Fundamentals for Non-Designers – Billy Hollis
  • Cloud or Not, 10 Reasons Why You Must Know “Web Apps” – Vishwas Lele
  • Mobile Apps for the Javascript Developer with Apache Cordova – Subhag Oak
  • Build Data-Centric HTML5 Single Page Applications with Breeze – Brian Noyes
  • To Git or Not To Git for Enterprise Development – Benjamin Day
  • What’s new in C# 6.0 – Jason Bock
  • Microsoft’s .NET is Now Open Source and Cross-Platform. Why it matters – Mark Rosenberg