Today I went to one of the lunch sessions. A little strange name, as you cannot bring you lunch with you to these sessions, as they are held in the usual rooms only containing chairs. They are just placed in the lunch break timeslot, and seems to be a possibility for the exhibitors to indirectly demo their products.

The topic of this session was “A Live Demo Introduction to the Kinect API”. I had hoped that the session would show ways to actual use a Kinect, but was more a presentation of a layer on top of the Kinect API that the speaker had developed. I guess there must be possible usage scenarios for Kinect-enabled software (also in business applications), but this session didn’t show any.

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Couldn’t find any testing related sessions in next timeslot, so went to DEV303 - ASP.NET Loves HTML5 on support for HTML5 in Visual Studio 2012. Also attended the workshop yesterday where we developed a Metro style application for Windows 8 using javascript, and surely it seems that use of HTML5/javascript is increasing. An example where use of HTML5 for making rounded corners, reduces 37 lines of CSS and HTML to 5 lines (left). On the right slide showing a new feature in Visual Studio to start up a different browser when debugging the web application.

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Then the session showed improvements to ASP.NET Server controls, e.g. FileUpload that has been extended with support for multiple files (since this is possible in HTML5), improvements to CSS editor and intellisense/compile-time-check of javascript code. Certainly useful for javascript developers, and my impression is that javascript will become increasingly popular.

 

Last session of the day was DEV312 - Creating Robust, Maintainable Coded UI Tests with Visual Studio 2012 presented by Brian Keller, which I of course had to see Smile

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As you can see from the “Objectives” slide above, this is basically the same talk he gave at TechEd last year, now just “upgraded” to TFS 2012. According to Brian Keller, the equivalent session at TechEd North America 2012 contained some more in-depth features presented by a member of the dev team for CodedUI Framework, but apparently this meant that some of the audience was “lost”. My feedback to Brian will be that he should probably split this session into two, one introduction (as this session more or less was) and then an advanced for people that have worked with CodedUI tests.

Some of the new features of CodedUI in Visual Studio 2012/TFS 2012 are different types of testing projects (left), a new field for error message in case an assertion fails (middle) and the most interesting where screenshots are taken for each test step (right). I think this last feature is actually more valuable than a video recording, as you get a picture per step, instead of having to find where in a video recording a specific step has been performed:

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Of course he showed the “action recording to CodedUI test” feature, where you transform a manual recorded action recording from Test Manager into C# code. I don’t think this will ever work, as it generates multiple UIMaps, and therefore I don’t think this can be categorized as “maintainable”…

 

The official part of TechEd today ended with a “Ask the experts” session where we had a change to talk with Microsoft employees about various issues and questions on our current TFS 2010 setup. Really valuable, and I really appreciate this kind of opportunities to speak directly with the people actually developing the products. Yet another fine day at TechEd.

After this the EURO 2012 semi-final match between Germany and Italy was shown in the "Theater" room, with burgers and beers for dinner, even though this wasn't planned originally. Again I'm impressed by the hospitality of Microsoft and the TechEd organizers.