Between the 13th and 16th of May, we attended the TechEd-DevCon conference, which is actually a combination of two conferences (the Technical Education conference and Developer Database Conference) and was held at Premiere Cinemas in Prague-Hostivař. During each block of the programme, there were four simultaneous lectures taking place, all of which were divided thematically in one of four distinct halls based on the subject of the talk:

• ShowIT Hall: Talks for network administrators and IT managers.
• DevCon Hall: Developer focused talks.
• BigData Hall: Database and data processing lectures.
• Mix Hall: Broad spectrum tech-related topics.

We were mostly taking part in the DevCon Hall lectures with a few visits to the other halls as well. This year, the DevCon talks were primarily focused on such state-of-the-art technologies as the .NET Core platform (both in its current 2.2 version and its soon-to-be-released 3.0 version) as well as the upcoming C# 8.0, Visual Studio 2019, and latest version of the .NET Core platform that will most likely be called .NET 5 and will unite the .NET Core and the .NET Framework branches, which totally won’t get confusing at all!

If you’re interested in knowing more about the new features of C# 8.0, I highly recommend reading through this great post: https://docs.microsoft.com/cs-cz/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/csharp-8

One of the more controversial new additions are the default implementations on the interfaces, since you might, at first glance, take this feature to be something that it’s not. The default implementations actually more closely resemble classic extension methods, where if you actually want to invoke an interface member with default implementation, the object in question has to be explicitly cast to the given interface type that holds the default implementation in question. This limitation, of course, makes sense because if you were able to use these methods “normally,” then that would basically mean introducing multiple inheritance into C# with all of its problems.

Out of all of the many interesting talks, I’d like to specifically highlight the lectures given by Michal “Altair” Valášek, of which the ones that we attended in particular were always very insightful. Another great talk, this time in the BigData Hall, “Unexpected killers of the database query performance” given by David Gešvindr was very useful with some enlightening explanations. And I’m sure there is a plethora of other speakers that are worth mentioning here, as everyone was an expert in their field.

Other than the many talks, there were also a lot of booths set up by many companies within the industry. There were also many chances to win some prizes, like our colleague, David Liberda, who walked away with a brand-new tent! Some of the booths also had puzzles to be solved in exchange for some small prizes. I’ll give you an example here. Give it a try and see for yourself whether you’ve got what it takes to be able to solve it. Have fun! 🙂

All in all, we would like to give a big “thank you” to the many speakers and partners at the conference for making it possible, all of whom can be seen here: https://www.teched.cz/en/#partners