.NET Rocks! is a popular internet talk show, and they’re taking the show on the road. Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell are traversing the country on their .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, making stops in over 37 different cities. I was able to attend their Detroit session in Southfield, MI yesterday. The event was hosted by the Great Lakes Area .NET User Group (with yummy BBQ provided by sponsor New World Systems), and it was a good time!
Carl gave a good talk and demo on creating modern, Windows Store app-style (formerly “metro-style”) apps. In the demo, a slick app was built to display and listen to .NET Rocks! shows using a simple web service. The code was minimal, but the app looked great thanks to the built-in styles–it was impressive to see how little code it takes to make a great looking Windows Store app.
Richard then took over and gave a talk about DevOps. DevOps blurs the line between IT professionals and developers, allowing them to coordinate efforts to evolve and improve applications over time. A big focus of this talk was on Microsoft System Center, Microsoft’s enterprise resource monitoring tool. System Center allows you to collect logs and events from different resources across the network and puts them into a consolidated view. New to System Center is the ability to hook into .NET apps, allowing you to specify and create events for things like methods that take too long. System Center can tie into TFS, so when an application event occurs, a work item can be created.
Third to take the stage was Microsoft’s Jeff Wilcox, independent creator of the popular Foursquare client 4th & Mayor. Jeff talked to us his experience with Microsoft, but most of the discussion was about 4th & Mayor. I’m not a Foursquare user, but I can appreciate what Jeff has done in creating this beautiful app with a focus on providing a great user experience. Jeff’s brief presentation was followed by a live taping of The Tablet Show, another offering from Franklin and Campbell.
It was a fun event. The food was great, it was entertaining, and I learned a few new things. Thanks to GANG for hosting and to .NET Rocks! for stopping by Detroit!
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