Two days of events for developers in Yekaterinburg

    The other day, on December 15 and 16, events were held in Yekaterinburg for developers and IT specialists of various kinds of classes. All events were held at the Ural State University (USU).

    Firstly, SKB Kontur organized a free lecture by the well-known agile development specialist Askhat Urazbaev . The topic of the lecture was entitled “ Flexible methodologies for building an effective software development team ” and covered the principles of creating a good team and how flexible methodologies help to do this.

    Askhat described problems in the organization of software development in great detail and explained why and how agile methodologies can help in solving them. A lot of examples were considered and specific scrum practices were presented. Despite the cold at –30 degrees and a rather late time, the lecture gathered a bunch of people and in my opinion was extremely successful. Personally, I did not work with agile and I was extremely curious to find out how agile and scrum work and what they can give.

    After the lecture by Askhat, the Ural .NET User Group met in the same building as the lecture, a floor below. It so happened that instead of the planned two reports, there was only one report at the meeting, and I made one. I don’t presume to evaluate my performance, but I tried to tell the most fully about numerous innovations in an hour of time4.0 an ASP.NET . The meeting was attended by a guest from Microsoft - Roman Zdebsky, who after my report was asked questions about WPF.

    As a supplement, I post the slides of my presentation and the source codes of the demonstrations. Download from here (pptx / ppt + zip).

    On the second day, yesterday, December 16, the next TechDays event was held , which is held twice a year throughout the country by Microsoft. The event, as usual, was divided into two parts: TechNet and DevDays for IT professionals and developers, respectively.

    The main and only TechNet speaker was Andrey Beshkov.Specialist from Microsoft. Anyone who has been to Andrei’s reports knows that this is a very competent speaker who is very pleasant and interesting to listen to. TechNet reports were on the following topics:
    • What's New in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 - An introductory report describing a significant number of architectural changes to new operating systems. If you were tormented or tormented by the question “what's new in Windows 7”, then the answer could be obtained on this report.
    • Optimization of branch networks based on BranchCache technology - the second report was devoted to a new extremely interesting development by Microsoft, which is a distributed (or centralized) cache in a remote office for caching and significantly accelerating access to data via HTTP (S) and SMB protocols. In general, the system resembles a sort of local peer-to-peer network of the branch level, in which data can be taken not from the head office, but from the nearest computer on the local network. All this is as secure and productive as possible. This is a cool thing, and as Andrei showed in the demonstration, it’s easy to set up, but it works efficiently.
    • DirectAccess: a secure corporate network without borders - the last third report was dedicated to the VPN killer - DirectAccess technology, which allows you to connect to your company's local network without a VPN and is much easier than a VPN. DirectAccess works through any provider whose access to HTTPS is not denied. Andrew showed a number of significant advantages of DirectAccess over VPN, ease of setup and spoke about his experience in using the technology. I got the feeling that the VPN will soon die off as a class, and DirectAccess, with the distribution of Win7 / Server2008 R2, will be implemented everywhere.
    DevDays - The second part of the TechDays event was dedicated to software development. There were two speakers - Marat Bakirov and Roman Zdebsky - both Microsoft representatives and software development specialists. The topics of the reports were as follows:
    • Introductory talk Microsoft Technologies for Developers: Present and Future Read by Roman. In it, he spoke about the latest trends in software development on the Microsoft platform, news and announcements that have occurred over the past six months. For example, Roman mentioned the announcements from the PDC conference. In general, the introductory report was a quick look at a huge part of the entire Microsoft technology stack. And if someone didn’t know something or missed the news lately, he could learn a lot from the report for himself.
    • Overview of the possibilities of Visual Studio 2010 - a more substantive report by Marat Bakirov was dedicated to just the latest release of the most popular software development environment. New Visual Studio tools were examined, what they give, why they were made and how to use them. If you have not familiarized yourself with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, then it's time to do it, because it is already possible to develop commercial applications on it.
    • The last third report, entitled Windows 7 Developer Features, was also read by Marat. In it, he explained clearly with examples what Windows 7 brings to the developer, how to implement this new in his projects and most importantly why you need to support the new Windows 7 features in your applications. Marat emphasized that the convenience of many of the innovations of Windows 7 will make your application more user-friendly and the introduction of support for such functions will bring you a competitive edge. A particularly interesting part was the part devoted to the implementation of multi touch technology, the support of which you can add to your WPF application, as was shown, with just ten lines of code.
    In general, TechNet / DevDays events were a success this time. Considering that yesterday the weather in Yekaterinburg was –30 degrees plus wind, attendance did not decrease and was high. Obviously, the relevance of such events is very high and if you are still not at them, then take an interest, maybe TechDays is also held in your city.

    The last two days were very useful, a lot of material, reports, speeches, communication with people. I think that developers from Yekaterinburg and the surrounding area should have been satisfied. If you live in Yekaterinburg, and still do not participate in such events, then welcome: come, listen, speak, chat with interesting people and guests.

    It was cool!

    PS: thanks to SKB Kontur and Microsoft for organizing excellent lectures and events.

    Progg it

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