Web Api Tips & Tricks – NT conference review and materials

As NT conference has passed, and I’m back in Split, it’s time to write a few words and put up the materials.

First of all, I would like to thank the organisers, Microsoft Slovenia and Bojan and Martin who have invited me to speak on the conference. As I love speaking about all ASP.NET things, I was very happy go there and speak.

I’ve been greeted so well there, that I definitely want to come back and speak again.

The conference itself had over couple of hundred attendees, and in my mind looked like a very nicely organised gathering of technical people, mainly developers from all aspects of IT business. It was very good to meet some new colleagues, but to also hook up with some old friends.

My presentation had some start up issues, but the ones you would never expect :)

As I came there, everything was going great…trying out my presentation and demos a couple of times the night before and the morning before went great, everything worked, my laptop worked…all the checks on my pre-speaking-check list were good.

However, when hooking up my laptop through HDMI to VGA adapter, the same one I use always on my presentations and which works great…it simply made for a very bad (not to say something worse) picture on the beamer.

Luckily, I’ve arrived there early enough to try everything, so we had some time to check things and get organised.

As luck wants it, after borrowing a adapter from Martin (thanks man! :)) the picture was much better, but Windows 8 in combination with the adapter and projector, just didn’t want to show Duplicate picture…it would extend it, but not duplicate it.

Not to loose time as with all of this mussing I’ve already spent my “reserve time”, I’ve agreed to borrow laptop from Bojan, which worked very nicely with the beamer and the adapter, and copied everything on it. This of course included configuring the whole application, adding the database, setting up rules in hosts file and such…and I crossed my fingers to make it work in that 1-2 minutes before the session. You can imagine the stress of it :)

Anyway…presentation went well, except for one big demo which failed in this transformation to the new machine. It was one of my favourite demos on OData and Web Api, so I was sorry to see that. I was able to show the code, explain everything, but the glitter effect of seeing it work was missed.

Other demos went ok, so it wasn’t all that bad, but still…frustrating to see it as it worked more than a couple of times and later when I found what I forgot to configure on the machine to finish setting up that demo.

After my part was done, I’ve spent some time of the session talking to the attendees about their impressions with Web Api, and had some very interesting questions on why and how it works, and some experiences from the people who were already using it. As I love to interact with people on the session, this was joyful to see.

Just too bad that I had a long ride home yesterday so I had to leave the conference early before the beers, but hopefully I will come back and talk again there and then spend some more time with the colleagues.

Briefly to give you an overview of what I talked about, my plan was to give demos on:

– Api versioning solutions
– OData and everything around it (v2 included!)
– Self hosting, CORS and Attribute routing love
– Playing with Controller pipeline
– Streaming videos and using the Tracing options

Hopefully some of you have landed on my blog and are reading this…If anything can be cleared up some more, or you are asking yourself some questions about these things, drop me a mail or leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.

The materials of the presentation, demos and slides are available on:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/txqhaf1tnahbdp0/WebApiDemos.zip

https://www.dropbox.com/s/emqybncuu6l7yae/WebApi.pptx
The demos include a readme file on how to setup things, if you need any help or clearing it up how to use any of these, let me know.

Hope you had a good time! See you on some next conf!