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A JEE developer’s journey into uncharted land
By Jakob Færch | September 29, 2008
I’m still trying to get back to breathing normally after two hours of speed cruising through what Ronnie Saurenmann claimed to be the entire .NET stack. I don’t know – from the buzzing of new impressions in my head it seems that what he presented in his talk A Developer’s Guide to the Microsoft Platform must have included even more than that.
The talk hit a dry spot for me personally, as my work for Trifork has allowed me to do some .NET development for the coming couple of months.
I was really enlighted to see lot of fellow Java developer’s in the audience. Some was there with the same need for immediate knowledge of the platform as me, but at least as many just went to explore other view points and opportunities for solutions to common problems – which is exactly what JAOO is all about.
The pure amount of technologies Ronnie walked us through in a live demo coding bonanza was impressive: LINQ to SQL, ASP.NET AJAX, WPF, XAML, ADO.NET REST Data services, WCF, Silverlight etc.
And as if the pure number of acronomyms covered wasn’t enough to guarantee satisfaction, every one of them was described very competently and with only a very discreet dose of Microsoft Marketing tone (Ronnie’s signature phrase seems to be a rhetorical self questioning: “Can I… [insert favorite technical desire]? Of course!).
And yes, the demo ghost did roar it’s frightening head more than once, so hat’s off to Ronnies coollness under fire.
Now all I’m waiting for is some months of travelling around in the new land of Microsoft developers, finding out whether .NET is the exception to the rule that the things that looked so nice and clean when used in the hands of the instructor as tools for solving classroom sized problems tend to give a somewhat messy impression when the humble students apply them to real world problems…
