The ArchitectNow team had another great year participating in this year’s DevUp Conference here in St. Louis (formerly St. Louis Days of .NET). There was a great turnout and it always feels like a family reunion where we get to catch up with old friends from all over the region. It is always good to catch up with all the fellow speakers, sponsors, and attendees.
If you have never heard of this conference you can find more info on their website at www.devupconf.org.
We would like to thank everyone who stopped by our booth to chat with the team and who made time in their schedule to attend one of our presentations. It’s always a pleasure to share what we’ve learned about technology and it means a lot to see such good crowds stop out to listen.
Below you will find links to various resources we shared during the talks given by our team. If anyone has any questions regarding these talks or the resources, please do not hesitate to reach out.
Some big thanks as well to the organizers of this great event and we can’t wait to see you again next year.
Sponsorship Giveaways
We were proud to again be a Gold Sponsor for this year’s event. As such we had the opportunity to meet many of the attendees and hang out at our booth playing video games and noodling with our new robot friend Cozmo.
Cozmo is an artificially intelligent robot with a personality as big as his brain. Cozmo loves to play games with his blocks and meet new faces. Be warned though, he’s a bit of a sore loser. Using the concepts behind facial recognition software, Cozmo interacts with his blocks and the people around him quite naturally. We were very impressed with his ability to be treated like a real live table-top pet.
The Raspberry Pi 3, certainly not a new discovery for many other technologists, was just as big of a hit as Cozmo at our table. It’s become a tradition to have a Retro Pi setup at our table for everyone to take a trip down memory lane to their favorite retro games, ours being Galaga. Each of our two Pi giveaways come with a whole bunch of accessories including two usb game pads, one 32gb microSD card, power adapter, Pi case with fan and heat sinks, and extra HDMI cable. The microSD card comes loaded with the Retro Pi OS however no ROMS are preloaded.
Talk Resources
Advanced Web Development with Angular2 and TypeScript
Kevin gave a Pre-Complier Session on Advanced Web Development with Angular 2 and Typescript this year. It was a walkthrough of setting up WebAPI to an Angular 2 front-end built on TypeScript, as well as some tools and libraries we use to make development more automated and robust.
Sample Project: https://github.com/ArchitectNow/ArchitectNow.DevUp16.WebDevPrecompiler
Frameworks
Training Resources
Editors
Plugins
Additional Tools
Efficient Communication between API’s and JavaScript
Another talk Kevin gave was about efficiently communicating between rich HTML/JavaScript applications and server-side API’s. He discussed how ASP.NET WebAPI (or MVC Json endpoints) can be used to quickly and easily set up your endpoints. Attendees learned how to best accept the inputs they need and return data in a format that is most useful on the client. Attendees also were introduced to the Json format and the intricacies of serialization of data. From the client, we discussed various options and patterns for calling these API’s and handling the serialization of data going up and coming down.
Using WebPack to streamline modern web application packaging and deployment
Another popular session Kevin gave was on WebPack. This packaging and deployment tool allows for efficiently serving chunks of content from the server to the browser.
- https://angular.io/docs/ts/latest/guide/webpack.html
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/35159872/angular2-typescript-importing-of-node-modules
- https://webpack.github.io/docs/list-of-tutorials.html
- http://www.theodo.fr/blog/2016/07/a-comprehensive-introduction-to-webpack-the-module-bundler/?utm_source=webpack_official_documentation
Real-world API development with ASP.Net Web API
Chris gave a session on API development in real world scenarios, using authentication, serialization, error codes, and smart design.
Using HockeyApp to provide great features and service for your customers
Chris also gave a session on HockeyApp which is a mobile application testing, feedback and analytic tool.
We’d like to especially thank all the sponsors for supporting the event, and of course the attendees for their time, dedication, and enthusiasm. It was a great event, already looking forward to next year!
Check out our Jumpstart Course coming up very soon for another opportunity to go deeper into rich front-end development!