My third day at JAOO started out with working in the eating area from 9:00 to 14:00, so i only got to attend two sessions. But atleast there was enough food at lunch. After the sessions there was a crew and speakers dinner. We got some very good food including a chili chocolate mousse, which was insanely good. It was a good way to end the conference.

Six Designs Principles Illustrated

This talk was about using some common design principles when making software. The presenter used three case studies to discuss a bunch of design principles. I liked the talk, it was interesting and presented well.

Concurrent Programming with Parallel Extensions to .NET

This talk was very interesting. It was about concurrency and how it will be handled in the .NET framework in the future. Parallel Extensions is an addition to the .NET that is currently in a beta stage. It will be a core part of .NET when the next big release will take place (C# 4.0). The talk gave rise to some thoughts about how I use for and foreach loops. For example in a typical for-loop, you specify an ordering, usually with the use of an index variable. In an foreach-loop however, you don't specify an ordering, and thus it is easier for the runtime system to run the loop concurrently.

My second day at the JAOO conference has ended. I had no duties as a crew, so I could spend the entire day going to sessions. I attended 4 sessions today. I had planned to go to a 5th session, however I was almost about to fall asleep in the last two sessions I attended. Not because the sessions where boring, but due to lack of sleep the last few days. When 30 odd helpers sleep in the same room, the majority being in young and drinking beer, the noise level has been too high for me to sleep properly.

How Cool do Users Feel When Interacting with Your Software

When entering this session i thought it was about how users feel when interacting with various pieces of software, and tips for what to do in order to get users to like ones application. Boy was i wrong! The session was more about how you could enhance the physically world around you with IT. As an example was shown a beanbag that you could use to display images on a wall. The more you messed around in the bag, the more pictures was displayed. Try to do that with a business application! The presenter was a researcher at Århus University with HCI as her research area, and she falls into the same category as some of the work i have been presented to at Aalborg University during my own studies: Research for the sake of research. Or atleast that is my opinion,

Identifying your Client's Needs

This talk centered around the issues of customers not knowing what they want. I liked the talk. It gave some good examples of what to be aware of when trying to identify a client's needs.

Architecture of a RIA

This talk was a joint effort by Josh Holmes from Microsoft and James Ward from Adobe. They gave  a talk about the background of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and what kinds of patterns are behind them (Model-View-Controller). They gave 10 best practice advices and 10 worst practice advices. All of them based on their own experiences. It was a very good talk, and it was cool to see that two RIA competitors (Microsoft with Silverlight and Adobe with Flex) joined forces inorder to spread the message about RIA.

RIAs using Adobe AIR & Flex

This talk was a continuation of the RIA introduction. This time with the focus on Adobe Flex and AIR, and with demonstrations of what you can do with those technologies. This was demonstrated by James Ward from Adobe. Again it was a good presentation, but unfortunately it was also the time when the lack of sleep really started to kick in.

I am attending this year's JAOO Conference in Århus, Denmark as student crew. It's pretty nice, I have to work for 2x6 hours during the 3 days, and the rest of the time I can attend the sessions as I like. A nice way to spend 3 days.

Where Are Programming Languages Going

The first session i attended was Anders Hejlberg's keynote speak about his views on the future for programming languages. He started out by giving a small demo of Turbo Pascal, which was the first language he helped create. He gave two reasons for showing the pascal demo. Firstly it is 25 years since it was made and secondly he wanted to show that not much has changed since then. At least not in the way we program today. 25 years ago you programmed using text files, and that method hasn't changed since. Anders's prediction as to how we program in 25 years, is that it will still be as text files.

A Developer's guide To the Microsoft Platform

After the keynote speak, i attended a session showing the possibilities with .NET and C#. During the session the presenter made an application using various new techniques for just about everything. Some of the topics covered was Ling to SQL,Silverlight, WPF and ASP.NET AJAX. Basically it was show how to use <insert Microsoft acronym for fancy stuff here>. But pretty cool though. I find it fascinating how much stuff you can make so easily using the .NET languages and Visual Studio.