The Essential Post-BUILD ASP.NET Playlist

I am back and mostly decompressed from //BUILD/ in Seattle. Lots of great product announcements – both digital and physical – and it truly is an exciting time to be a programmer on the .NET stack.  With releases in nearly all product groups from server to desktop, productivity tools to development tools and even hardware, we are seeing a company that is involved with and involving the open source community in more and more of what it considers to be at the heart of it’s development experience.

What You Missed if You Missed It

Not everyone was able to attend //BUILD/. I got in last minute on a waiting list. Others who had previously registered were dealing directly with Hurricane Sandy’s devastation, or indirectly with the impact on Eastern transportation and were otherwise unable to attend.  The facility was also limited in space – something that Steve Ballmer addressed in his keynote – resulting in greater than anticipated demand and preventing many who wanted to attend from doing so.

For whatever reason you were unable to attend, I present to you the list of sessions available on Channel 9 that are must-sees for every developer on the ASP.NET stack.  As a professional eager to improve their skillset and continue learning, I highly encourage you to invest 6 hours into your career and watch these sessions on-demand.

The Basics – What’s Here and What’s Coming

Here’s a quick look at the things that are already here and available to developers, and a few things that are on the horizon.  First up, the ever-funny Scott Hanselman on the state of the stack.

 

Next, Scott teams up with Jon Galloway for an entertaining peek at some of the new and not-yet-ready bits we have to look forward to.  This covers everything from Web Essentials, to a brief look at SignalR, templating updates, direction on the ASP.NET team and more.

 

From a script side of things, there are some major improvements to the way we write client side code.  My call is that TypeScript is going to be huge in our community and something you won’t get away with not knowing within a year.  Anders Hejlsberg walks you through.

 

As well, Mads Kristensen has a great talk on the experience in Visual Studio.  The tools we have at our disposal make me look back on 1999 and wonder how the heck any of us made it work.  We have a great kit, and VS2012 is bar-none the best IDE out there.

 

In the Wings and Good To Know

There are some technologies, features and libraries that are critical building blocks for us web devs.  Daniel Roth tackles some of this with coverage on Web API and cross-client development.

 

Real-time apps are becoming the norm, especially if you’re working in the “social” space, but this is true also of games, LOB applications and pretty much anything else you can think of.  And, yes, even chat .  Check out Damian Edwards and David Fowler as they demo the juicy pub-sub power of SignalR.

 

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And There you Have It

Those are my top picks for web devs.  There is one more very track that you should be aware of – touched on in many of these talks – and I encourage you to explore all of the cloud content on Channel 9

    Cloud Talks from //BUILD/ on Channel 9

I wish you all a very happy infusion of knowledge and awesome!