Today, the rally of sessions started.

The first one was on “Code First Development with Entity Framework (EF)“. EF v4.0 is still a new product, but for RAD (Rapid Application Development) this can help to quickly create a new project and have a sense of the data model in a short period of time. However, the feature that “re-creates” the database everytime you launch the application must not be delivered into Production (right now, you must implements the logic in the configuration or comment that part of the code before building the application and shipping it into Production).

Next, I went to “Open Data for the Open Web” (OData) – speaker: Jonathan Carter – Excellent session.

The “Open Data Protocol” (aka OData) is a standard created and proposed by Microsoft. It is a thin layer on top of “HTTP + ATOM”, with new keywords “to do operations on data” (filtering, sorting, count, updating …).

You also get the CRUD operations on the data exposed simply over the HTTP(S) protocol and available through the web. There is no “atomic transaction support”, but for quick read access to data that does not change often (like referential data) this is excellent. If you need to write transactional data, maybe using a compensating model could be enough – if not, then you will need to write a web service.

Jonathan showed us good examples of OData usage using the http://odata.netflix.com/v1/Catalog/ and http://odata.twitpic.com/ (see also http://www.odata.org/).

OData is really about:  “HTTP & ATOM” + Query + JSON + Metadata.

The latter (Metadata) was maybe what have been missing for a while. With Metadata, programs can now generate code that will automatically navigate through the hierarchy of the data.

Then it was “The Future of C# (v5.0)” – presented by Mads Torgersen (Program manager for C#) and Lucian Wischik (Program manager for Visual Basic). The main point was about the new feature “Asynchronous Programming” in the next version of C # v5.0.

There will be a new pair of keywords, “async” and “await” to identify code that must run asynchronously. Writing code this way looked so easy, that I needed to write it myself to believe it. Definitely something to try out using the CTP link above.

Finding a place to have lunch was not an easy task – Imagine 6000 people going to lunch almost at the same time, queueing through corridors to get inside enormous room – I must admit, I would not have done better organisation. So, Bravo! to all the people involve during those 5 days in the lunch logistic operations.

Next, the good session from Jeff Prosise on “Code Like a Pro: Tips, Tricks and Techniques for writing Killer Silverlight Applications”.

Then, it was another good session, this time by Jon Flanders on “Windows Sever AppFabric Caching”.

I finished the day by doing my first lab on Windows Phone 7 – The Puzzle game application. A few links to get started on Windows Phone 7:

• Windows Phone 7 Training Course .
• Complete Windows Phone Training Kit (Silverlight & XNA) .