Over the weekend I attended Philly Code Camp where over 700 attendees were present with sponsors like Microsoft, Apprenda, Infragistics to name a few. It was one of the well-organized events I attended. You can read more about the event and event organizers at http://phillydotnet.org
There was a great lineup of Microsoft Technology speakers with 11 tracks in parallel. And their main goal is Lots of code, just say no to slides. So here are the sessions I attended.
Developing WinRT apps with JavaScript by Rachel Appel
Although not a fan of building native apps in HTML5 and JavaScript, I wanted to see the potential in creating Windows 8 Apps. You can Brent Schooley’s (Technical Evangelist at Infragistics) blog about Choosing XAML or HTML5 for Windows 8 Development
From a developers perspective I prefer writing native apps using XAML to write quality and secure apps. You have more control over debugging and testing XAML apps as compared to HTML5 & JavaScript apps.
Next session I picked was Designing for Windows 8 which was very interesting session. Brent Schooley was the speaker; you can follow him on twitter at @brentschooley. He is also writing a book on Designing for Windows 8 http://bit.ly/designwin8 and I am eagerly waiting for that. He talked the Bauhaus movement and how the Windows 8 Design concept picked up. Basically Windows 8 Design focuses on minimalistic design and on Content over Chrome. He quoted Saul Bass “Design is thinking made visual“. Saul Bass was a graphic designer and filmmaker who could effectively tell you the entire movie in under 100 seconds with his awesome title designs.
He covered the following Key Windows 8 Design Style Principles:
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Pride in craftsmanship
- Sweat the details
- Make it safe and reliable
- Balance, symmetry, hierarchy
- Align to the grid
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Be fast and fluid
- Life is mobile
- Delight with motion
- Design for touch
- Intuitive interaction
- Be responsive and ready
- Immersive and compelling
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Be authentically digital
- Cloud connected
- Dynamic and alive
- Beautiful use of typography
- Bold vibrant colors
- Motion
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Do more with less
- Be best at something
- Focused and Direct
- Content over Chrome
- Inspire Confidence
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Win as one
- Fit into the UI model
- Reduce redundancy
- Work together to complete scenarios
- Tools and templates are designed to scale
I will cover more sessions I attended and the details in my next few blogs. My next blog will be about Making a Windows Phone App Scale Using the Cloud.
