A few weeks back I had the opportunity to attend the MonkeySpace conference.

For all of you that missed it, I highly recommend planning on attending it next year.  If you did miss it, this year is not completely lost as the awesome folks over at Monkey Square are planning on making the videos of the sessions available at some future date.

I had a great time meeting some awesome people and attending some great sessions.  There are several really exciting technologies out there that are worth following discussed at the conference.

Here is a bit of a recap of some of the sessions that I attended.

First, The top secret keynote that Miguel De Icaza delivered.  The major topic was the release of Mono 3.0 and the future of the ecosystem.  Some of the really cool features of Mono 3.0 is full c# 5.0, System.Net.Http, TPL DataFlow, Code Contracts, entity framework, razor, asp.net mvc 4, F# 3.0, and 64bit support on OS X.  The 3.0 release is very exciting not to mention lots of ‘lameness’ will be going away with the new async stuff.  There are also improvements to sgen the new garbage collection system in Mono that should help improve performance.  Mono is seeing a lot of success in the gaming side of the market as well.  Some other areas that will receive focus are code analysis, bug finding, and profiling tools.  In the next year Xamarin expects to deliver new MonoTouch and Mono for Android versions based on 3.0.  Very exciting stuff!!!

Second, ServiceStack.  This was a very full session and I was lucky to find a spot to stand in at the back of the room.  Sadly this meant that I missed parts of this presentation, but definitely plan to look more seriously into it once I get the chance as a replacement for wcf.  Hopefully the video comes out sooner than later for this one!

Third, GitHub.  Phil Haack did a great job presenting on GitHub and the awesomeness that it is.  I had seen some of it before, but really like seeing the command line style interface that is built into the web interface in action.  He also did a demo of the API that is available and there were some really cool things in there.  I’m very interested in the possibility to integrate pull requests into some Continuous Integration system.  It would be cool to know right away if the pull request would break the build or not.

Fourth, Vernacular.  Aaron Bockover, now a Xamarin employee, was great enough to post his slides here.  If you are working on a project that is targeting multiple platforms and need it to support multiple locales then this is definitely a project you need to check out.  Very promising!

Fifth, Mobile Development with C#(book).  Greg Shackles is definitely someone to follow and watch in this market segment.  He has been doing some great work including writing a book about it.  If you are considering writing a mobile app that is targeting multiple platforms I definitely recommend picking up this book.

Sixth, Effective MonoDevelop.  Michael Hutchinson is an awesome developer that has contributed a great deal to the MonoDevelop project.  His blog has some great tips that makes using MonoDevelop even better.  It is definitely worth the read.

Apart from all of the sessions there was plenty of time to hang out with some rockstars in the Mono community.  It is always great to chat with them in person and get feedback on questions and problems.  I am definitely looking forward to next year’s conference!  Keep up the great work!

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