Notes on Toronto Code Camp 2010

If you haven’t read the live blog on our visit to Toronto Code Camp 2010, I highly encourage you to scan through it here: http://www.pioverpi.net/2010/05/01/toronto-code-camp-live-blog/

I should warn you though, I have a bad habit of shooting my mouth off without thinking too much about the impact of my words.  In fact, I am a perfect example of the Johnathan Gabriel Greater Internet Dickwad Theory.  I hope that this follow-up post can clear up some of my initial reactions at the event.

Here are some of the notes that I took down from the seminars we attended

Developing for the “Third Screen” Windows Phone 7

Speaker Details

Mark Arteaga

mark@redbitdev.com

blog.markartega.com, www.redbitdev

Highlights

• Two main development platforms when working on Windows Phone 7: Silverlight and XNA
• Microsoft actually has strict control over the phone hardware
  • capacitive touch screens (4 point contact)
  • 800 or 480 px height
  • 480 or 320 px width
  • sensors: A-GPS, accellerometer, compass, light sensors, proximity
  • camera: 5mpx or more
  • multimedia with codec acceleration
  • minimum 256mb of RAM, 8gb of flash memory
  • DirectX9 with dedicated graphics
  • CPU ARMv7 Cortex/Scorpion
  • hardware buttons: back start, search
• It has a pretty slick UI, and when you work on it with VS2010, it looks pretty cool on the emulator
• Actually, if you work with Blend then you can do that fancy “pivot” thing with the new Windows  Phone 7 UI
• The API has various soft keys that you can bring up for various situations
• Single processing only!  All your threads will be paused when your app is switched
• Tile notifications
• METRO design philosophy

Links

msdn.microsoft.com/windowsphone

windowsphone7.com

developer.windowsphone.com

live.visitmix.com/Sessions/Tags/WindowsPhone

Building Windows Phone 7 Series Games with XNA Games Studio 4.0

Speaker

Nickolas Landry MVP

Practice Manager

Infusion development

nlandry@infusion.com

Highlights

• XNA is not a game engine, more of a framework for simplifying the game loop
• I’m looking through my notes now, and unfortunately, I don’t have much to say, aside for XNA is cool?
• The speaker did a walk-through of his code, which as I remember, wasn’t exactly stellar, so I won’t repeat my comments from the live blog here

Optimizing Ajax for Maximum Performance

Speaker

Todd Anglin

Telerik

telerikwatch.com

Highlights

Where Did Ajax Come From?

• Outlook Web Access to begin with asynchronous requests
• Asynchronous Javascript and XmlHttpRequest
• XHR = XmlHttpRequest
• AJAX has never been officially been standardized
• every browser does it differently

Three Pillars of AJAX

1. Data (XML, JSON, HTML)
2. XHR
3. JavaScript

How AJAX works

Browser -> HTTP Request -> Server

Server -> HTML, CSS, JS, AJAX Lib (js file to help AJAX) -> Browser

Browser -> JS -> AJAX -> XMLHttpReqeust -> Server

Server -> XML Data -> AJAX -> HTML

• AJAX makes your initial page load SLOWER!
• the reason why is the AJAX library is being sent OVER to your browser

How Do You Choose

“Traditional” Postbacks

• HTML rendered, updated server side

Server-side rendering (AJAH)

• HTML rendered on server, updated on client

Client-side rendering (AJAX)

• HTML created and updated client-side

- everything after this point is lightning fast

• “Pure Ajax”

- hard(ish)

What makes it hard?

Browser Differences

• use libraries (gooooooo JQuery!!)

Updating the DOM

AJAH (Asynchronous Javascript and HTML)

• prepackaged HTML
• swap out the old HTML area with the new HTML

AJAH

• good
  • easy to implement
  • no code changes required
  • execute aspnet page lifecycle
  • no javascript required
  • easy to turn-off
  • easy
• bad
  • designed for ease of use
  • executes aspnet page lifecycle (“sneaky PostBack”)
  • viewstate
  • renders on server

Why Do We Use AJAX

maximizing

- reduce server overhead + reduce bandwidth = more responsive application

Approach 2

• move towards a web Service HTML
• no Page Lifecycle, no ViewState
• still like AJAH

Pure Ajax Approach

• no viewstate
• no page lifecycle
• optimized for performance
• rendered client-side, only Data OTW, JavaScript required
• emphasis on pure JSON
• updates on UI occur on clientside
• you could do that manually or use “templates”
• updating the DOM by hand is a pain in the ass
• client-side templates
• - jTemplates, or Microtemplates

The Rich Standard: Getting Familiar with HTML 5

• <!DOCTYPE html>
• 9 new structure tags
• 16 new HTML elements
• 13 new <input> types
• html 5 backwards compatible
• semantic tags (header, footer, nav, article, hgroup)
• gives semantic meaning to your HTML layout, screen readers and BOTs
• FIX ID: html5shiv
• use modernizer API to check if HTML 5 elements are supported on a browser

Understanding the Blackberry Web Development Platform

• I’ve got notes on this, but like the XNA talk, I’m going to decline to comment
• This thing was a 100% RIM pimping out their products