Tech Ed Day Three

The fun continues in Houston, I've meet some great people and am learning plenty to keep me a busy and happy developer. I had originally planned to scope out just the developer track sessions, mostly on Windows and Windows Phone developoment, but given that there is so much to learn, I thought I would wander a little out of my comfort zone and see what else is out there!

Here are some highlights from the sessions I visited on Wednesday.

Exam Prep: 70-483 - Programming in C# - This is actually the exam I expected to take this week, so I signed up for some review and prep.

After attending this I realized there is still a lot about C# that I'm not using, not just to pass the test, but in general. The Parallel, Diagnostics, and Encryption topics were of particular interest, so I'll definitely be reviewing that before I jump in. If you are considering the exam, be sure not to miss the Programming in C# Jump Start session available FREE from Microsoft Virtual Academy.

High-Volume, Low Latency Mobile Push Notifications was a bit over my head as I'm only barely exploring this feature, but it was really cool to see how easy it is to manage and deliver Push Notifications with the Notification Hub in Azure. The ability to scale and especially route messages by defining and targeting specific types of users looks particularly useful, I look forward to exploring this further.

A Practical View of Release Management for Visual Studio 2013 - This was probably the most exciting session I attended today, as they demonstrated how you can leverage the Release Management for Visual Studio to create a release pipeline that automates delivery of your application from Dev through the review workflow, including staging, QA, and release. This is an issue that as a developer I've seen over and over, and can really bottleneck your process. And while the setup and management of this feature is certainly over my head, I can definitely see the benefits this would bring to any development team.

Latest Innovations in Developing ASP.NET MVC Web Applications - The last session of the day was a closer look at the web-related updates to .NET. A lot of this was already mentioned briefly in other sessions, but it was nice to see a thorough walk through of the features live and in action with Visual Studio. As for the original sessions I was going to attend, I've listed them here mostly as a reminder to myself to go back and watch them, as there's some great topics here.

• Cool and Elegant ASP.NET Web Forms with HTML 5 for the Modern Web

• Windows Runtime for Windows Phone Developers

• Building Maintainable Windows Store Business Applications Using C#, XAML, and Prism

One More Time!

Only Thursday remains and I'm already excited to learn more. It's been great to be here and meet so many people, and of course to see so many people using and enjoying the Channel 9 Events App. If you'd like to say hello and share your feedback be sure to ping me so we can chat!