Today was the first day of DevWeek 2012, and I am happy to say that I have had a great day! I have never been to DevWeek before, and the format of it is slightly different from other developer events that I have attended. I am lucky enough to be attending the whole week of events at DevWeek, and today there was a choice of 9 different sessions. These ranged from “A Day of Metro” to “Agile Primer”. Reviews of the other days of DevWeek can be seen here:

Pre-Conference Workshop at DevWeek

Presenter: Jeff Prosise (you can find his blog here and his twitter here:

Topic: HTML5 Workshop

HTML 5 is the newest version of HTML, and it is taking the programming world by storm. It combines new markup elements with a host of new JavaScript APIs to bring HTML into the 21st century and to enable developers to build rich, feature-filled Web applications without relying on browser plug-ins such as Silverlight and Flash. In this full-day pre-conference tutorial, we’ll take a deep dive into HTML 5 and show all the bells and whistles, including new markup elements, browser support, audio and video, the canvas API, local storage, web workers, geolocation, and much, much more.

Thoughts: In house, we are heavily invested in Silverlight, however, HTML 5, although still not officially a standard, and yet to be fully implemented in browsers, is certainly making waves, and I was very interested to hear about what it is, what it does, and what actually works. The day long workshop was broken up into the following sections:

Introduction
Geolocation
Audio and Video
Canvas
Web Workers
Web Storage
Files
Drag and Drop
Networking

With each section, Jeff had a number of very good demonstrations with he was able to show working (in some cases this meant switching between different browsers), and this really helped to concrete the topics that were being explained.

If you are interested in seeing the demo code, it is available for download here. As a suggestion to Jeff, if he is reading, I think it would be great if these samples were to make them onto something like GitHub. With the rate at which the HTML 5 specification is evolving, along with changes to browsers implementations, having the code in GitHub would allow it to be easier maintained and updated. Just an idea.

One thing that I really enjoyed about todays workshops were the synergies that Jeff was able to bring to the table. With a background in Silverlight, Jeff was able to give honest opinions about how things differed between the two technologies. Both the good and the bad. This really helped!! I think the important thing is going to be knowing when to use HTML 5. In some places it is going to make sense to use it, in others, continuing to use Silverlight (which is due to be supported for the next 10 years) is still going to make sense.

All in all, Jeff was a great speaker, and I really enjoyed this day long introduction to HTML 5. I am very much looking forward to the rest of the week, and looking ahead at the sessions available Jeff has a number of other sessions which I am now thinking about attending. The problem here being that there are SO many good sessions on offer, than choosing between them is going to be very hard! For the Post Conference Workshop I am signed up for “A day of unit testing” with Kevin Jones, which I think will be a really useful day!