Microsoft DDC 2013 Reflections

A few weeks ago, I attended and spoke at this years Danish Developer Conference by Microsoft. The conference was run in both Horsens and Copenhagen and both venues were cinemas. I gave a talk with Mads Kristensen with the topic of Visual Studio productivity tips. Mads covered plain Visual Studio and I gave a whirlwind tour of what productivity with ReSharper could look like.

The venue

I loved both venues, MegaScope in Horsens and Cinemaxx in Copenhagen, presenting in a cinema is just amazing. Forget everything about presentation resolutions and just fire away - Cinemaxx's projectors were 4K (4096 x 2304px). Having 60+ m2 of screen estate makes everything much simpler. Combined with comfortable seats it was really enjoyable. We had an entire cinema as a Speakers Lounge as well.

My talk

As previously mentioned, I gave my ReSharper whirlwind tour. The talk has very few slides and focuses on giving a quick overview of the most basic features in ReSharper. If you are looking specifically for my ReSharper slides, I have some old presentation blog posts containing a richer set.

I think it will be the last time that I am going to give my basic ReSharper talk, unless specifically requested - since I have given it quite a few times now. I might be tempted to create a more advanced ReSharper talk at some point though. Maybe I will actually speak about some C# related stuff next time.

Other talks

I was generally happy with all the talks I saw, but I want to recommend 2 talks specifically, if you happen to get a chance to see them at a user group or at another conference:

Advanced Unit Testing (Danish: Unit testing for viderekommende)

Mark Seemann is a very experienced speaker and a passionate proponent of automated tests. This talk gives an introduction to some of the patterns to avoid brittle tests, especially in regards to test object construction and equality. In many regards it reflects some of the painful experiences I have gone through over the years.

Bigger, Faster, Stronger: Optimizing ASP.NET 4 and 4.5 Applications

Mads Kristensen has given this talk so many times but it is better every time and it touches on so many helpful things to optimize your web pipeline from the server to the client. The talk is based around the Web Developer Checklist - so if you can't see the talk live, at least take a look at the checklist.