Anglebrackets 2018, MGM Grand, Las Vegas – Day 3

Keynote (Scott Guthrie & Scott Hanselman)

Today the “real” conference began with a keynote by Scott Guthrie who presented a lot of colleagues to show off demos of different products and technologies. Marketing in essence! It is again pointed out how committed Microsoft is to open source and how much they actually contribute to the open source community.
On thing worth mentioning is that you can already start seeing the impact on Microsoft acquisition of GitHub, there are a lot mot integration between GitHub and Azure DevOps.
After Scott, the next Scott came in the form of the amazing Hanselman. As always, a joy listening to him and also many laughs.
One highlight was when he and a colleague, via a fake phone call, called Scott and asked him to help fix a bug. The colleague used Visual Studio on Windows and Scott Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu Linux. They used Live Share to pair their sessions (note the differences with both operating system and Visual Studio/Code) and started debugging together, watch each others cursor’s position and code selections etc. Impressed that there wasn’t any latency and a really nice way to collaborate together. It could apparently be used in VS2017 via some additional installation and will be installed in VS2019 by default, which by the way was announces as a preview.
My reflections on these keynotes is that its’s starting to become much theater and fully prepared demos, but I suspect it might have to do with the conference now coexisting with the Microsoft Connect() conference. Previously, there was more open source, more real geek demos with live coding.

What’s New in ASP.NET Core 2.1 and beyond – Jeremy Likness

The first session after these keynotes was “What’s New in ASP.NET Core 2.1 and beyond”. Not so much new that I had not seen before. A little demo on Blazor that I’m still not completely convinced about. It’s a little bit of Silverlight, but it’s based on technologies that are NOT Microsoft’s own (WebAssembly). Building web interfaces in C#, hmm, yes maybe. Another thing was Razor libraries (a way to pack razor views for reuse, I think …). I should have selected a Progressive Web Applications session instead.

Introduction to vue.js – John Papa

On to the next session after a good lunch. Now it was time to go a little outside my box and look at something that I have not seen anything about before, vuejs! This sessions was held by John Papa and it was also him who had an angular session about 3 years ago where I fell in love with the Angular CLI. He demoed some of vuewjs features using their CLI and yes, the feeling appeared again; really nice!
Something that I hope will also come to angular in the future is a user interface for monitoring a local “instance” of an angular application, like the vue UI. Via vue’s CLI, you can simply run “vue ui”, which starts a browser with a graphical interface of the application: dependencies, lint config, serve (start / stop), performance measurements, etc. Really really smooth if you’ve familiar with all the configuration and files involved in a modern js application.
I was looking forward to asking John after the session if there are something similar to Angular Elements even in vuewjs, it doesn’t. But, he thought I should wait a little with Angular Elements because of the new rendering engine (Ivy) that’s coming to Angular will make packaging easier and smaller. Vue applications have a much smaller footprint and may be an option to look forward to for ui composition. The syntax is not much different, you’ll recognize yourself!

Build your first Xamarin app in 75 minutes – Robert Green

Further towards an additional outside the box session. “Build your first Xamarin app in 75 minutes”. This could have been better if his Android emulator had worked, which he dribbled with quite a lot of time of this session. There was no direct info in depth here, but I still got a little understanding of how to get started. I would have liked to see bit more on how to use native features on the devices, how to do specializations for a particular device and so on. It was a “basic session”, but I was expecting a little more than running file -> new project (with default templates) -> F5.

In addition, I picked up a brand new T-shirt, hows that!