This past week I had the opportunity to do presentations about Blazor and Oqtane at a number of community events both locally and internationally. This required me to update my slide deck from the DNN Summit to include the latest information from Microsoft about Blazor, including clarification of the client vs. server hosting models, release schedule, and more technical details about how the technology works under the covers. And now that Oqtane has been officially released as an open source project, it also allowed me to include some information about why I created the project, the technical goals of the original proof of concept, and the reception by the .NET community.
The Palm Beach .NET Meetup meeting was hosted on Tuesday evening at our Cognizant Softvision office in West Palm Beach and was attended by some of my Cognizant Softvision colleagues as well as a number of members from the local .NET community. My presentation was primarily focused on Blazor and its underlying technologies. The was a lot of interest in the technology and plenty of active discussion about why Microsoft is interested in offering support for WebAssembly at such an early stage of its evolution. In general, the group seemed to be much more interested in the potential of client-side Blazor and also seemed to be a bit skeptical of the performance and scalability of server-side Blazor. Obviously, there is still 3 more months before Microsoft ships .NET Core 3 so I am hoping that many of these questions will be addressed before then.
I also did a presentation at the DNN-Connect conference in Switzerland on Friday. The DNN-Connect Association in Europe has been hosting DNN events for more than 10 years and they always choose a location and venue which allows attendees to really experience the local culture, and this event was no exception. The conference was hosted in the small village of Champéry in the Swiss Alps. There were a lot of excellent presentations and demonstrations by talented members of the DNN community, and I was privileged to be provided a prime time slot in the largest auditorium. I believe the audience was expecting more of a focus on Oqtane; however, I felt it was more valuable to focus on educating them about Blazor so that they fully understand this exciting new development opportunity. I also reserved some time for a short demonstration of Oqtane at the end of my presentation which seemed to impress the attendees with its functionality and close similarities to DNN. This led to many valuable one on one discussions over the next 2 days with a variety of community members where they shared their opinions on Blazor and their preferred path forward for DNN. In addition to attending technical conference sessions, the organizers also offered a variety of fun activities that attendees were able to take advantage of in the early evenings. These included hiking, rock climbing, mountain biking, downhill scooters, and paragliding ( although the last item had to be cancelled due to high wind risks ). Overall it was an outstanding event and I deeply appreciated the opportunity to re-connect with the community.
If you are interested in viewing the presentation, you can download from here.