Recently, I had the chance to attend Live! 360 in Orlando, Florida, a four-in-one conference with presentations focused on Microsoft development (Visual Studio Live!), SQL server building, developing and managing (SQL Server Live!), SharePoint building, developing, implementing and managing (SharePoint Live!) and Cloud Computing (Cloud & Virtualization Live!).

I primarily attended Visual Studio Live! and SharePoint Live! presentations. Over the course of the five days (two days of workshops and three days of conferences), the main subjects discussed were development for Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and WinRT with Visual Studio 2012, MVC 4, XAML, JavaScript and jQuery and many more!

On the whole, the presentations and keynotes were excellent, with my favourites being:

• “Build a Windows 8 Application in a Day” workshop by Rockford ‘Rocky’ Lhotka, CTO of Magenic and the creator of the widely used CSLA .NET development framework
• “Windows 8 and the Flexible Workstyle” keynote by Stephen L. Rose, Senior Product Manager for Windows Commercial team for Microsoft
• “What’s New in Windows Phone 8 for Developers” presentation by Nick Landry, Senior Product Manager at Infragistics
• “Application Lifecycle Management: It’s a Team Sport” by Brian Keller, Principal Technical Evangelist for Microsoft specializing in Visual Studio and application lifecycle management
• “Applying JavaScript Patterns” by John Papa, former Senior Technical Evangelist for Microsoft on the Silverlight and Windows 8 teams, and the author of more than 100 articles and 10 books on various technologies
• “Cross Platform C# for iOS, Android and Windows” by Bryan Costanich, Director of Education at Xamarin (the makers of MonoTouch and Mono for Android), former Microsoft Architect and published author
• “Building Single Page Web Applications with HTML5, ASP.NET MVC4, Upshot.js and Web API” by Marcel de Vries, author of articles and whitepapers on .NET and Team System for MSDN

There are many more, but the list is too long to discus in-depth, so let’s focus on the first three listed above.

Workshop: “Build a Windows 8 Application in a Day”

I knew of Rocky Lhotka from having read some of his articles, but had never seen him present at a Microsoft conference and I’m pretty happy that it is done now! Looking back on it, Rocky was by far my favourite presenter of the week (I’ve also got to give a mention to Stephen L. Rose – what a great pitch seller!). Rocky was really sticking to his point, was funny and really knew how to keep the crowd focused. He talked about the Windows 8 development platform and how Windows 7 developers will have to adjust their skills to follow the wave. Then, before getting in the code, he talked about the WinRT platform and its languages projections, application models and how development will now be more in sync to avoid performance bottlenecks and enhance the overall responsiveness of our applications. It was a great day.

Keynote: “Windows 8 and the Flexible Workstyle”

After a great day at Rocky’s workshop, I headed to the opening keynote by Stephen L. Rose even though it was late. I was so convinced by his speech that I wanted to throw out my iPad and Galaxy Nexus and buy a Windows 8 Phone and the new Microsoft Surface tablet.

We were also able to make our mind between Surface and Surface Pro and I saw that even Surface is good, Surface Pro is going to be so great! Biggest differences between these two:

• Surface runs on ARM, meaning that it won’t run desktop applications such as Visual Studio for example
• Surface Pro is going to be able to run Kernel applications (running on an Intel processor), and will also be able to run Flash or Silverlight apps
• Surface will be the Microsoft version of the iPad – but slightly better – and Surface Pro is going to be in a league of its own!
• One drawback of the Pro version: it’s going to have a battery life of approximately five hours compared to 10 hours for the regular one

Like I said before, Steven L. Rose was so excellent that 10 minutes before the end of his presentation when he announced that he was going to take question from the crowd, I said to myself, “What? Already?”

Presentation: “What’s New in Windows Phone 8 for Developers”

I attended a conference by Nick Landry, a Montreal native who spent the past eight years working in New Jersey. Professionally, I don’t do much mobile development, but I’ve always been really interested in it. That said, I went to his presentation with no real expectations other than to learn a little more about developing for the Windows Phone.

And it was greater than expected! We learned a lot, including what makes Windows Phone 8 so unique and some impressive stats:

• There are more than 200/day new applications in the Windows Store
• There are over 28,000 approved developers in the WP marketplace and over 100,000 registered developers in Microsoft AppHub
• The limited number of apps in the Microsoft Store presents a great opportunity for developers to create Windows versions of apps that are already being sold in the Android Play Store and Apple App Store

A few of you may wonder why people bother to develop apps for the Windows Store when only 2.6% of mobile phone users in 2012 used Windows devices. According to IDC (International Data Corporation), there will be five times more Windows Phone users in the next four years! That’s a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 71.3%, making it by far the largest among all companies.

We than explored the subject more in-depth and learned many new Windows Phone 8 features, including what’s new, what the advantages are for developers, and we also talked a little bit about the update dilemma between WP 7.5 and WP 8. We also learned how it can compile data in the cloud, how the activation policy, the tile templates and sizes work. Finally, we reviewed how it is possible to develop and deploy using whatever technology makes sense, whether it is web-based, email or an app. Great subject, great presenter, I had a great time!

Overall, the quality of the presentations at Live! 360 was simply amazing. I hope to attend next year and share more about Microsoft technologies with you.

Tags: Apps, Conference, Live! 360, Microsoft, Microsoft Development, Surface, Windows Phone 8

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