Google Hangout: DevConnections Speakers Talk About Trends in Application Development

This Thursday Dev Pro held a live Google+ Hangout where we invited DevConnections speakers, Craig Shoemaker, Shy Cohen, Chris Love, Ido Flatow, John Peterson, Pranav Rastogi, and Stephen Bohlen to talk about trends in software development. This year's DevConnections conference is being held from September 30th to October 4th at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.

This year's DevConnections conference is different from previous years, and this is our attempt to get in touch with our community and get your feedback. Our strategy is a community-first mentality, and this is the second Google+ Hangout that we've done in last two weeks to reach out to the community. This Google+ Hangout brings the speakers together where you listen to them to find out why they picked their session topic and learn how each session is complementary and inter-related. It's different than many other conferences where the task of picking sessions is delegated to track or content chairs and the speakers never end up interacting. This year we're focusing on making the interactions happen between the speakers and the community.

In this Google+ Hangout, the speakers get an idea of what other speakers are presenting so there's no overlap and gives you as a guest an idea about which sessions you'll want to attend. In this hangout, we cover several different topics such as SignalR that's being presented by none other than Pranav Rastogi from the Microsoft ASP.NET team. In the hangout, he talks about why you need to use SignalR and its advantages. He also helps explain that by not only using SignalR on web servers, but also using it in-process using Katana which is based on OWIN. He briefly covers Nancy, a lightweight web development framework for .NET, and talks about different trends in the application development along with the Microsoft ASP.NET team's roadmap. After the hangout today, Pranav had an Aha! moment where he decided to change his second session to include the latest identity related changes that have been added into Visual Studio 2013.

We also had Craig Shoemaker talk about how to take a lot of these different frameworks and technologies such as HTML5, Web API, Bootstrap, and Entity Framework to build world-class web applications. Stephen Bohlen brings up his talks where he will get into real world scenarios and explain how Domain-Driven-Design can be used correctly to solve enterprise problems. Shy Cohen and Ido Flatow talk about how to do caching correctly and explain best practices surrounding HTTP fundamentals. John Peterson and Chris Love get into talking about JavaScript testing, debugging in modern browsers, best practices for web performance optimizations, and more.

We also briefly touch upon the workshops that we're doing, including a workshop by Ido Flatow on HTTP with ASP.NET Web API and another on creating single-page applications (SPAs) with best patterns and practices. More information can be found on the IT/DevConnections web page. Feel free to bring your own laptop (BYOL) and join us in the amazing experience of creating an awesome web app.

Feel free to watch the video to listen to other DevConnections speakers, including David Giard and Esteban Garcia. Please feel free to reach me at [email protected] if you have any questions, concerns, or comments. Hope to you at this year's IT/DevConnections!