Where are you from ?

My blog being a little more than 1 year old now, I wondered what’s my audience in the world. So here are the results based on Google Analytics :

Audience in the world

First observation : audience is worldwide, which is pretty cool.
Second observation : top 5 countries are

1. United States
2. Belgium
3. India
4. United Kingdom
5. France

These results aren’t surprising to me :

• My blog being written in english, US is the biggest audience
• Myself living in Belgium and blogging about belgian events (such as Visug, Techdays), here’s why this little country ends up second
• India, offshoring a lot of software development, holds the third place
• UK : same conclusion as for the US
• France : having started recently to blog some posts in french, it has led France to enter the top 5

1st : United States

Best audience is coastal states. Makes sense in a way : isn’t the pinnacle of the geek attitude to be on the beach, laptop on the knees ?

Top 5 states are :

Techdays 2010 - Day 2 (1 april) : my notes

And here’s the second and last part of my notes taken at Techdays 2010.

Session 1 - Unkeynote
By Scott Hanselman

• A quick recap of ASP.NET 4.0 new features, such as :
  • Clean HTML : specify client IDs (better for JS and CSS)
  • ViewState improvements (enable it just for some controls, …)
  • Charts
  • Cache extensibility : HDD based caching
  • Customized Web.Config (staging, prod, …)
  • Clean URLs for WebForms (REST)
  • Client-side binding in JS
• MEF : Managed Extensibility Framework (design applications as components able to interact with others)
• Parallel Computing : “threading for the masses”, so developers can focus on the business and not on concurrency problems

Session 2 - Introducing MVVM
By Laurent Bugnion

• MVVM stands for “Model - View - ViewModel”
• Advantages :
  • More testable
  • More maintainable
  • Blendability (ability to be edited in Microsoft Blend)
• A lot of code examples
• Laurent Bugnion has created the MVVM Light Toolkit, intended to accelerate the creation and development of MVVM applications in WPF, Silverlight and in the Windows Phone 7.

Session 3 - Visual Studio Tips
By Sara Ford

• Sara is author of a book about Visual Studio Tips, such as shortcuts, productivity enhancement tips, … And the session was a sample from this book
• You can find the tips she’s given on her dedicated blog entry

Session 4 - What’s new in ASP.NET 4.0
By Fritz Onion

• Javascript intellisense + snippets
• Routing (ASP.NET MVC URLs style)
• ViewState improvements (ability to enable/disable it for a particular control, disable it application wide, …)
• Ability to specify a ClientID (which is better for Javascript and CSS, no more need to use “ends-with” selectors
• SessionState : store the session of the user in DB
• Meta tags : ability to specify them code behind
• Charts : a large collection of charts (including some based on Dudas charts)
• QueryExtender : create filters for data that is retrieved from a data source, without using an explicit Where clause in the data source

Session 5 - Software testing with Visual Studio 2010
By Brian Keller

• Software bugs cost billions of $ each year in the U.S
• Today, still too much manual testing (about 70%)
• Introducing Testing Center : interface to configure test plan :
  • Type of logs to produce
  • OS or browsers to test with
  • …
• Test recording : user is performing actions being recorded and can be replayed later => about 20x faster than manual testing
• If a test case fails : video to show what happened
• Intellitrace : listing all the events and processes done by the app. Very useful to find quickly what went wrong (instead of placing breakpoints, doing some guess work, re-running the app, …)

Session 6 - ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 : what’s new
By Fritz Onion

• Fritz started by announcing that Microsoft decided to make jQuery the primary way to develop AJAX apps using Microsoft technologies (officially announced by ScottGu at MIX in March)
• As a consequence, no more effort will be put by Microsoft in the MS AJAX library
• No notes to list here as the session was obsolete following that announcement

Techdays 2010 - Day 1 (31 March) : my notes

I finally take the time to blog my notes about the 2010 edition of the Techdays, after some pretty busy weeks of work dealing with deadlines.

Session 1 - Developer keynote
By Anders Hejlsberg, Hans Verbeeck, …

• Evolution of computer languages (from Turbo Pascal to now) and evolution of hardware (HDD capacity : 100 000 x, RAM : 10 000 x, CPU : 1 000 x)
• Evolution of tools : debugger, profiler, huge frameworks, …
• 3 major trends today
  • Dynamic
  • Concurrent
  • Declarative (more on WHAT instead of HOW)
• Multi-core CPUs : need to develop accordingly (Parallel Linq, Task Parallel Library, …)

Session 2 - Silverlight 4 & WPF 4
By Gill Cleeren and Katrien De Graeve

• Silverlight 4
  • Printing : visual tree to select what to print
  • Drag & drop : even from an external app (eg : drag an image from the explorer to Silverlight). Also works on Mac
  • Right-click support
  • Webcam & microphone support enabling powerful applications : scan barcodes with the webcam, …
  • RichTextBox : rich formatting (fonts, colors, images, …) into a TextBox
  • Out of browser enhancements : notification windows with custom look, complete control over the window (change the size, no borders, …)
  • Trusted out of browser apps : go beyond the sandbox
• WPF 4
  • Visual Studio 2010 : built onto WPF
  • Better tooling : similar to WebForms design
  • Support for Win7 : multi-touch, ribbon, taskbar manipulation, …
• When to use Silverlight or WPF ?
  • Tip of Gill Cleeren : “make Silverlight the default choice for business apps unless you require specific WPF features”

Session 3 - C# 4.0 and beyond
By Anders Hejlsberg

• Dynamic keyword : be static as much as you can (compilation checks, performance, refactoring, error checking, …). dynamic should be use to simplify the syntax (replacing invoke, binding flags, etc)
• Optional & named parameters : avoid multiple overloads, supply default values. Better experience with interop : no more 15 “missing” parameters
• Co & contra variance : to simplify, developers can now work easier with collection types, and have less problems with linq queries
• Compiler as a service : API of the compiler (meta programming, language objet model, …). Introduction of the new CSharpEvaluator class

Session 4 - ORM with entity framework in .NET 4.0
By Kurt Claeys and Hans Verbeeck

• ORM : working with relational tables like objects in memory
• Why use it ?
  • Productivity
  • DB independance
  • Hides complexity, uniform way of working
• Entity framework is a Microsoft strategic technology (they use it in Reporting Services), which is a sign that they bet a lot on it
• 2 ways of working
  • Model first : DB doesn’t exist yet, design classes and generate SQL code from it
  • DB first : DB already exists, generate classes from it

Session 5 - ASP.NET MVC 2 : ninja black belt tips
By Scott Hanselman

• First, Scott gives us a tip to avoid repeating the same code : use T4 (text templating) to automate it (related article)
• Hybrid apps : you don’t have to choose between ASP.NET Webforms & MVC. Ex : codeplex is written with both, some parts being exclusively WebForms or MVC
• Then, a lot of demos…

Session 6 - Building Windows Phone apps with Silverlight
By Giorgio Sardo

• A lot of demos in this session about what can be done with the phone (layout rotation, custom styling, …)
• To summarize, a citation from the speaker : if you’re a Silverlight developer, you’re a Windows Phone developer

And that’s it for the first day ! See you in a next post for my notes about day #2