Microsoft is evolving, and it feels like they are upping their game of helping developers create great software.  I truly believe there has never been a better time to be a software developer.  Here are some things I learned from the recent Tech Ed held in Houston, TX.

My main take away was regarding Microsoft’s roadmap for ASP.NET. Microsoft’s next version of ASP.NET, ASP.NET vNext, is coming sometime over the next several months and you can watch its evolution on GitHub (https://github.com/aspnet/Home):

• ASP.NET is going modular, just include what I want from NuGet.
• ASP.NET is going Open Source
• Microsoft and Xamarin are partnering to provide a strong mobile cross platform solution
• .NET config file and package management merging into a new format using json
• Deployment greatly simplified with runtime and framework deploying with application

Beyond this main takeaway regarding ASP.NET vNext, there were several other observations I had regarding various technologies and practices.

BrowserLink – powerful tool with VS that can aid CSS and HTML debugging on multiple browsers

Biztalk Hybrid connections – a solution to the problem of wanting to keep certain data and services on premise while other data and services are in the public cloud

SOLID deeply embraced by community at Tech Ed.  Chris Klug covered these principles really well in this session: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2014/DEV-B315#fbid=

Angular is gaining major traction as a framework for declaring dynamic views in web-applications.  Nice tools to use with Angular: Hot Towel – good jumpstart, Side waffle – nice template helper, and Breeze – rich data and validation experience on the browser

If you are trying to wrap your mind around Dependency Injection, this will help, as Miguel Castro builds up an example with no DI all the way up to a version with a real world implementation of DI that covers a number of practical edge cases:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2014/DEV-B412

Mads Torgersen shined some light on how you can create race conditions by accident when using async in C# along with some great tips and tricks on how to use async correctly.  I particularly liked his coverage of when to use Parralel.ForEach (for CPU bound tasks) vs Async/Await  (for I/O bound tasks):
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2014/DEV-B362#fbid=

Rowan Miller introduced me to a mocking framework for EF6: EntityFramework.Testing.Moq

Found out that EF7 will be a massive rewrite of a 15 year old code base and was happy to hear that it will include optimizations for low memory and for NoSQL databases.

Enjoyed a bunch of web app performance optimization tips from Mads Kristensen (note: I’d heard a lot of these a year earlier from Altaf Mehmood, so props to Altaf):
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2014/DEV-B418#fbid=

A here is a nice checklist from Mads for making sure your web page is up to scratch:
http://webdevchecklist.com/