Skip to main content

LEAP Sweden in Redmond

Well, there is not very much to say about the trip to Redmond, except that it was awesome! It has been a week filled with seminars and social activities in Microsoft Conference Center and closeby venues. We even paid a visit to The Flight Museum outside Seattle and actually got a private tour from Clemens Vasters, who knew surprisingly much about airplanes.

Not only have I been able to meet other extremely talented developers and architects who participated in the LEAP program, I've also had the chance to meet some of the most involved people at Microsoft and got to hear about the latest and hottest topics in IT today.

The speakers included Jonathan de Halleux, Stuart Kwan, Scott Guthrie, Miha Kralj, Clemens Vasters, Cihan Biyikoglu, Bryan Agnetta and more. The topics were everything from theoretical architectural lectures to deep product previews and technical discussions. Overall it was a great schedule packed with so much information I almost don't know what to do with all of it.

There will be announcements in the near future for some of the previews we got to see. For instance the new Azure improvements will be announced June 7th and as you might know we got the Release Preview of Windows 8 just a couple of days ago. There sure are a lot going on right now and I know I'm going to stay alert to keep up!

Here are some other interesting stuff that was mentioned during the seminars:

  • Meyers Briggs Type Indicator: "A good architect should be at least N and T" - Miha Kralj
  • Pex is a Microsoft Research project which aims to automatically generate test suites with high code coverage tests. Pex4Fun takes the Pex engine and makes it into a fun programming game.
  • Moles is a cool isolation framework which makes it possible to replace system methods with your own delegates, for instance replace DateTime.Now with a custom date. This framework will be included in .NET 4.5, named Fakes.

I really hope that there will be a continuation of LEAP next year and I would recommend (almost) anyone to attend. I would also like to give a big handout to Björn Eriksen who made this arrangement possible, and did it really well!


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Cornball goes to Brunch with Chaplin

Lately I've been working pretty hard on different projects but not really stumbling upon anything blogworthy. The most recent project is quite interesting though, a single page, touch friendly, web application using the latest and greatest technologies. We've ended up with using Brunch with Chaplin , which is a very neat way of setting up a Backbone based single page web project with Brunch and Chaplin . Aside from this, I have my own little project that has lived on for almost 15 years already, The Cornball . From being a plain Windows application written i C an Win32 API, it has been ported to .NET using WPF, and is currently a Silverlight application hosted on Windows Azure. I could not find a better time to reanimate this project and create a new web based version, touch friendly, super optimized, awesome in any way. So I did... So please follow my journey at Github . It's going to take a while, I assure you, but I already have some ground work done. Meanwhile,...
2 comments
Read more

Bindable RichTextBox with HTML conversion in WPF

In WPF , the RichTextBox  control is not really like other controls. Due to its flexible nature, there is no built in way of binding a property to the content. In this case, I wanted a simple  RichTextBox  control with a binding to an HTML formatted string to be able to use the built-in formatting features of the  RichTextBox  and allow users to create simple HTML formatted content. First, doing the conversion on-the-fly proved to have major performance issues, so I ended up binding the content to a XAML string. The XAML to HTML conversion can be performed at any time. I created a UserControl with a bindable Text-property. The view contains a  RichTextBox  control. <RichTextBox x:Name="richTextBox" TextChanged="OnRichTextBoxChanged"> The source code for the user control contains the Text property and the methods to handle the binding. public static readonly DependencyProperty TextProperty = DependencyProperty.Register( "Te...
Post a Comment
Read more

Binding Enum with DescriptionAttribute in WPF

Binding an enumeration to a ComboBox can be done in several ways. In most cases you don't want to display the value itself, but a more user friendly description. One common approach is to use the DescriptionAttribute on the Enum values to supply a description for each value.  This is all possible in a very MVVM friendly way. First step is to add the  DescriptionAttribute  to the values of the enumeration. public enum MyValues { [Description("First value")] First, [Description("Second value")] Second } To retrieve the description from the enum we use a simple extension method. This method returns the value of the DescriptionAttribute if it exists, otherwise the string representation of the enum value is returned. public static string GetDescription(this Enum value) { var fieldInfo = value.GetType().GetField(value.ToString()); var attribute = fieldInfo.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(DescriptionAttribute), false).FirstOrDefault() as ...
2 comments
Read more