Computer Jedi..

.. is what greeted us when we registered for the MSDNLive event in oslo yesterday (21. October).  With a focus on guiding and inspiring the attendees to unlock their potential, along the lines of Luke and Obi-Wan, the scene was set for the day’s sessions.

The show was opened by the Community Marketing Manager in Microsoft Norway; Petri Wilhelmsen and Microsoft Architect Børge Lund.

it’s all in the clouds

There was a strong focus on cloud computing and appfabric in the first sessions. Olav Tollefsen dived into the hands-on experience of creating and deploying an MVC2 project to azure, as well as going into SQL Azure and tables/blobs. Børge Lund talked about Windows server AppFabric, which turned out to be an extremely interesting topic.

calling out for web standards

Jonas Follesoe, Microsoft MVP, concluded the day with 2 excellent sessions on Windows Phone 7 and HTML5/IE9. He made some great points of diffusing the HTML5 buzzword; emphasizing how it shouldn’t become the new “Web 2.0”, but used as a correct term with other new standards like CSS3 / SVG.
Be forward-compatible!
Jonas mentioned strategies of enhancing the user experience for users with browsers with advanced capabilities, but not compromising the experience for existing users. Instead of using graceful degradation for older browsers, use it for current browsers. This is quite easily accomplished with browser feature detection instead of user agent sniffing.

where to get more info?

Videos of the talks from msdnlive are going to be published here, so keep an eye out for upcoming content.