By their own admission, the organizers tried to squeeze most interesting stuff into the first two days, so the third day was less agile and prone to repetition of the already stated facts.

Extending XAML. I enjoyed a presentation of very energetic Miguel Castro about extending XAML with converters and markup extensions. I must admit I was lured by the promising title “extending XAML to overcome almost any limitation” and an “advanced” rating of the session. Unfortunately, I saw nothing I did not already know. This does not mean that Miguel gave a bad presentation, this just means I know a thing or two about converters and markup extensions 🙂 There were also limitations that were not discussed in the session. The most annoying one is that when binding, the data context does not propagate to non-visual properties of the controls, unless they derived from Freezable. This problem happens most often with libraries with extensive “settings” objects like Infragistics. You can easily bind a property on the control itself, but if you try to bind a property of something like XamDataGrid.FieldLayoutSettings, you are out of luck, since data context is propagated at runtime, and only down the visual tree, of which FieldLayoutSettings is not a part. I am afraid this is a limitation that even Miguel can’t overcome.

SQL Server Data Tools. I also attended a presentation on SQL Server Data Tools suite. Database management tools is not my forte, so I had no choice but to nod politely when statements like “SSDT replaces BIDS” were thrown around. I’ve got an impression that there is a plethora of Microsoft database management tools out there (SSDT, BIDS, Visual Studio DB Pro, SQL Server Management Studio, …), and all of them are lacking this feature or another. When after the session I asked the presenter (Leonard Lobel) should we stick to RedGate SQL Compare and SQL Source Control, he gave me a definitive “yes”.

Which, by the way, underscores one interesting the fact. While there is no denying that these events are a big promotional gig for Microsoft products, the sessions are conducted by speakers, who are, for the most part, are not Microsoft employees, and who are intellectually honest. If they think a third party tool is better and Microsoft tools sucks, they will say so without hesitation.