So Techdays is right around the corner and I’ll be attending for the third time.I’ll be attending all kinds of sessions going from Windows 8 development to the complete deep dive track on web to my favorite subject, Windows Phone 7 development. I’m also excited about the Scott “The Gu” Guthrie doing the opening keynote and doing a session the second day. Also presenting this year is Laurent Bugnion, the father of the awesome MVVM Light framework.

Here’s the list of sessions I’ll be attending, this list is subject to change depending on if I change my mind the last minute, as I’m known to do sometimes .

Tuesday February 14th

• Opening keynote with Scott Guthrie
• Welcome to the Metro Application Platform
• Windows Phone Fast App Switching, Tombstoning and Multitasking
• The Future of C# and Visual Basic
• Devices + Cloud: Using Azure on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, …

Wednesday February 15th

• ScottGu unplugged
• Take a ride on the Metro
• The zen of async: Best practices for best performance
• MVVM Applied: From Silverlight to Windows Phone to Windows 8
• MVVM & WCF RIA Services: an architectural story
• Building a data intensive application

Thursday February 16th

This is a deep dive day, I’ll be following the web track that focuses on what’s new in ASP.net 4.5 and Visual Studio 11

Work on my own blogengine is going slow but steady.

I currently have a SQL CE 4 database, an Odata service that exposes an entity model of the database and 2 MVC 3 projects, one for the backend and one for the frontend.

For now the backend will have the default asp.net mvc3 template, the frontend will be WP7 style.

Stay tuned!

Update

So the conversion to MVC3 is about done, I've uploaded the first testversion to http://www.huizedegraef.be/test and so far it's working fine.
The next step is to get the admin panel up and running, stay tuned!

Original

So the conversion of the Huize De Graef project from asp.net webforms to MVC3 is going really well.
A first testversion ran fine on my local test server using the trust configuration of the webhost (thank you SoHosted for providing the file) but unfortunatly once uploaded Entity Framework wouldn't connect to the MySQL DB, always giving security errors.

After spending 2 days researching and mailing with the SoHosted support team still no solution. At Techdays 2011 I heard something about SQL Server compact edition, a Microsoft SQL solution that didn't require an installation. A quick test indeed proved that MVC3 apps using EF and SQL CE work perfectly on the webhost.

So currently I'm converting the MySQL to SQL CE, I'm hoping to have it online by the end of the week.

I just found an interesting article about Dynamic Data in ASP.net.

This technology allows you to build a SQL powered website in mere minutes. The article is build around the Adventureworks DB and uses .net framework 4.

The article can be found here (MSDN magazine)

The Belgian Microsoft Techdays 2011 will take place 26-27-28 April at Metropolis Antwerp.

I'll be attending, hope it will be as good as last year.
Things I look forward to:

• Silverlight 5
• C# 5 (asynchrony in particular)
• HTML5 and CSS3
• Windows Phone 7 development
• Hopefully some XNA session

Info on the techdays can be found here