DeveloperDays conference
I came back yesterday after two day conference .NET DeveloperDays taking place in Warsaw. This year edition gathered around five hundred developers from all around the Europe. Conference main focus lies in Microsoft development areas including Windows, Visual Studio, Azure, ASP.NET and many other related technologies.
Organizers made sure to invite many well known and experienced speakers including
- “Hi, I’m Scott” Hanselman – a teacher, programmer, blogger and maybe most importantly guardian of community around ASP.NET 5 as a keynote speaker
- Scott Hutner – Principal Program Manager at Microsoft who gave momentum to latest changes in ASP.NET
- Clemens Vasters – Ex MVP, for 9 years working as an architect at Microsoft in Redmond. Expert in cloud solutions involved in linking IoT world with cloud based solutions including Azure
- Tomas Herceg – MVP, Microsoft Regional Director. Expert in few areas like ASP.NET, Visual Basic as he proved at DeveloperDays – in Roslyn compiler
- Robert Pickering – Expert in F#, author of Beginning F#. Experienced in building large scale scalable applications. Personally very nice buddy on whom I had luck to stumble upon during DeveloperDays party
… and many others known from my own Polish perspective, like:
- Adam Granicz – author of four F# books and MVP on F#
- Jakub Gutkowski MVP, blogger [PL] geek
- Tomasz Kopacz – peculiar cloud (solutions) specialist
Hanselman and Hunter on stage
Second day of the DeveloperDays conference started with talk “Intro to ASP.NET 5” conducted by Scott Hanselman and Scott Hunter. More than enough to get people awake after a party day before. Full record of this talk should be soon at YouTube, but before that, I will try to summarize:
At least two of three great Scotts (the third one was not on the conference) encourage people not to develop any business application on ASP.NET 5 CoreCLR yet. The reasons are obvious – it’s not finished. Yet. Instead developers should stick to already released and stable .NET Framework 4.6 and, if it makes sense for the application, compile for CoreCLR for learning purposes.
Also Scott Hunter promised that team will continue to work on ASP.NET performance. The goal is be at top 10 in benchmark TechEmpower tests. Beating NodeJS, many nginx configurations or even very performant Java based web servers like Netty isn’t going to be an easy task. Key principle is to stay modular. Benchmarks usually test very simple scenarios. Overhead like loading framework or any other unnecessary component must be made optional to achieve world class performance. Microsoft team seems to have at least proof of concept how to get there. Last benchmarks shows that ASP.NET 5 on Kestrel server is already three times faster than NodeJS implementation. Still not even close to Scala TechEmpower implementation though but first experiments using RIO – Registered Input/Output API Extensions are promising.
At the same time Microsoft does not forget about business applications for corporate needs. Their principal requirement is to write applications as fast as possible as most of them has only a few thousand of users. And again – modularity is the key to tie both ends. One remaining ingredient of this magic sauce is to have an easy way of loading modules and that’s where NuGet everything approach and C# extension methods shines.
After the “Intro to ASP.NET 5” talk I had an opportunity to speak with Scott Hunter directly. I was happy to hear and feel how engaged he is in changing Microsoft’s approach to Open Source. His attitude in combination with unquestionable skills in winning people to his cause can make a big difference in future of Microsoft and our life as a .NET developers.
Summary
I was impressed with second edition of DeveloperDays. Although there were minor inconveniences (like noise during session or registration problems) organizers did very good job. I encourage every .NET developer to at least follow @DeveloperDaysPL on Twitter and check news (and follow me @BleedingNEdge as well). Next year edition of DeveloperDays has been announced and will take place 19-21 October 2016 including one day for workshops.