Once again, I was lucky enough to get a spot as a speaker at TechEd USA. This year, I am speaking about the SOLID principles, and about ASP.NET Web API. So far, I have managed to get one talk under my belt, and I personally think it went well!
An interesting, and kind of sucky part about TechEd this year is the fact that it has been sold out, and put in a location where there is not enough even enough room for everyone to attend the keynote sessions. Speakers were asked to not attend it, but instead watch it in one of the “overflow rooms”. Unfortunately, even these seemed to overflow. So I watched the keynote on a big screen TV in the exhibition area.
I must admit that it didn’t really matter that much. Being TechEd, there is still a heavy focus on IT Pro, and only about 18% developers here. This means that the keynote focus was very much about IT Pro and cloud, and did not include a whole lot of news. It was however interesting to hear how extremely heavy cloud focus Microsoft has. It is definitely here to stay if anyone was thinking something else!
The second part of the keynote was a little different. Unfortunately, I had to skip it as I was scheduled to work in the MSE booth. Luckily, as the information released in the keynote was partly affecting my presentations, Microsoft had been nice enough to give me a heads up, which meant that I knew a bit about what was coming…
What came was the announcement of Project K, or ASP.NET vNext. It changes a whole lot in the way that we build .NET application on the server, and is something I will definitely cover in much greater depth and a later point. But for now, there are a few highlights that are good to know about…
First of all, the whole ASP.NET stack will be unified completely. That means that WebForms, MVC and Web API all live together. They will also be disconnected from the server implementation in a very similar way to the one used by OWIN. And it will be compatible with OWIN…
Next, the project structure changes quite a bit. We will see much less, or maybe even no project file at all. Instead, a lot of the project information, such as dependencies etc will be stored in a JSON file instead. It will also be possible to include command line executable functionality in the JSON file. This functionality means that you can for example run your web application from the command line instead of having to to use IIS Express or IIS… And that’s just the beginning…
And finally, while developing, you don’t have to compile your web application to get your changes. Instead, the code is compiled on the fly using a new JIT compiler and Roslyn, which by the way was open sourced as well… This means that we don’t need to spend time compiling and restarting the app pool and so on, making our changes faster…
But keep in mind, this is an early CTP. There is much more to be done, include performance tuning… You can read more about it over at Scott Hanselman’s blog.
Yeah…that is about it! As I haven’t been able to attend sessions as I have been busy preparing sessions and manning the MSE booth, I haven’t seen much else… But as I said, I will definitely be back with more about ASP.NET vNext soon. But for now, I suggest studying up on OWIN and dependency injection. Knowing these two things will help you a lot when you get started with Project K. Kind of lucky that I have a blog series about OWIN going right now, isn’t it… 
Cheers!