Developer Diary: DotNetConf 2020

16/11/2020 dotnet conference speaking blazor

DotNetConf was a 3 day worldwide conference over 3 days (November 10th-12th) where we could learn about all things .Net from the teams at Microsoft and community experts.

All conferences are virtual in 2020, but DotNetConf has been doing this a while, 10 year anniversary this year. It shows in the production, everything is super professional in the streaming and presenting. Well done to everyone involved!

Well, let's start at the beginning... the keynote! Lots of well known folks in the dotnet community giving us an update on things, and of course the release of .Net 5!! Check out the video here.

For me, if there was a key theme for DotNetConf, it would be Blazor. Perhaps this is as I have an interest in this technology so I looked at the agenda with this in mind, but here are some of the Blazor talks I really enjoyed:

  • I really enjoyed this session "A talk for trailblazers: Blazor in .Net 5" by Safia and Steven. I have been following Blazor since before it launched, so getting an update on the optimisations and new options was really good. It's great to see that improving performance and developer experience was top of their priority list for .Net 5.
  • Also on day 1 was a great session by Daniel and Javier discussing integrating Blazor in an existing MVC app, I think this is a really useful usecase for developers to see that Blazor doesn't need to totally replace their whole app in Blazor, but can integrate in their codebase as is appropriate where dynamic data updates on page are required, a shopping basket in their example.
  • This session on JAM stack by Aaron Powell discussed how Blazor fits in to the JAM stack world and also showed how to integrate to a Dev Ops process including separate environments for feature branches, which was cool to see.
  • "Blazor: Client Side vs Server side: Hands on development and deployment" was a really great session by Dr. Otto Dobretsberger to learn the key differences in the variations of Blazor with the pros and cons. Watch here.
  • Another great talk on Blazor was by an Umbraco buddy of mine, Poornima. She shared lots of useful knowledge on components in Blazor, how to integrate to your app. Check out her session here.

This year I was lucky enough to find myself on the speakers list for DotNetConf! Still can't quite believe it to be honest! My session is here: "Getting started with Blazor". Thank you to everyone who send messages of good luck before the talk and well done after. Y'all are great! 💜

But of course, it wasn't *all* about Blazor, I really enjoyed these sessions:

The talks were through all timezones, so some talks I still need to catch up on, you can find the videos here: https://www.youtube.com/c/dotNET/videos 

Again, super well done to the DotNetConf team, all speakers and the awesome community who watched and contributed on the live stream chats and social media.

See y'all next year!

You can see more "Developer Diary" blog posts, discussing experiences as a developer and at community events on my blog.

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