ProgressNEXT 2019 – A Developer’s Perspective

Last month (May 7th – 9th 2019), I had the opportunity to attend ProgressNEXT in Orlando, FL. The opportunity to attend was presented to me by my good friend Sam Basu (@samidip), Developer Advocate at Progress Software (@ProgressSW). For a long time, my experience with Progress Software has been focused on the user interface developer tools offered under the Telerik brand name. After some additional research, I learned that Progress Software has a broad range of tools and platforms that, from a developer perspective, present additional opportunities to deliver solutions to our end users and customers.

 

The team at Progress Software is awesome. I was fortunate to meet Courtney Ferrucci and Danielle Sutherby who help me with the logistics of getting to ProgressNEXT. Their attention to detail is impressive especially given the fact that they were key participants in planning ProgressNEXT for over 500 attendees. They truly made me feel welcomed the entire time of the event and were wonderful hosts.

 

Upon arriving, I was greeted by the excellent team operating the registration desk. Registration was flawless. My registration was located, badge printed, and swag bag presented in what felt like under a minute. Once registration was completed, I strolled over to the evening reception where attendees were presented with a wonderful selection of food and drinks. There was also a live band playing great music which was perfect for the evening and a live alligator welcoming us to Florida.

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The first day of ProgressNEXT began with a great opening session. Loren Jarrett (@LorenJarrett), Chief Marketing Officer, welcomed all of the attendees and built up our excitement for all of the value we were about to receive from the additional session speakers and other conference sessions.

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The next speaker was the CEO of Progress, Yogesh Gupta. He gave a wonderful presentation on Modern Application/Systems Architecture and very eloquently demonstrated how various tools from Progress can provide value when considering/designing these types of solutions.

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Once the general session ended, it was time to get into the details of the various technologies that were either a part of or could be leveraged within the Progress ecosystem.

 

The first technical session for me was titled “Getting Started with NativeScript”. Having a background in web development, you would think that I would have naturally transitioned from Angular/Typescript to NativeScript for mobile development but that was not my chosen path. So I decided to attend this session to get a better understanding of what NativeScript was all about. Rob Lauer (@RobLauer) was the presenter and he did a wonderful job sharing with us the basics of NativeScript and how it matched up with other similar frameworks. We also built a simple NativeScript app and learned how NativeScript fits into the Kinvey Platform.

 

So what is this Kinvey Platform? Well, I heard Kinvey mentioned in the couple of sessions I attended already and did not know anything about it so I thought it would be a great idea if I attended the “Getting Started with Kinvey” session. Tara Manicsic (@tzmanics) was the presenter and she did a wonderful job introducing the Kinvey Platform and how, as developers, we can leverage features such as storage, authentication, and serverless functions. The platform provides those core functions that just about every modern application requires. It was pretty easy to use and I will definitely try it out on some future projects to acquire some hands on experience. Building on my initial introduction to Kinvey, I attended a session led by Ignacio Fuentes (@ignacioafuentes), Progress Sales Engineer, that covered how to improve mobile app offline experience using Kinvey. It was a great session and demonstrated how to leverage Kinvey’s technology to provide offline data storage and synchronization.

 

If you know me, then you are aware that one of my many technology passions is Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms. ProgressNEXT hit a home run by having Sam Basu (@samidip), Progress Developer Advocate, deliver a presentation on Xamarin.Forms. He touched on the standard target platforms: iOS, Android, and UWP but also cover other options for utilizing Xamarin.Forms: MacOS, Tizen, and web. Sam, as always, did a great job covering the latest features and opportunities for leveraging Xamarin.Forms to create cross platform applications.

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Following the Xamarin.Forms presentation, I attended a session led by Carl Bergenhem (@carlbergenhem), Product Manager, Web Components @KendoUI and @KendoReact, that covered what’s coming in R2 2019 of Telerik and KendoUI. There is a lot of great things in this release which is now available and you can check out here: https://www.progress.com/kendo-ui. From my perspective, the most exciting updates were for UI for Xamarin (of course) and UI for Blazor. It is amazing how the Progress team is rapidly evolving the toolset, especially giving that Blazor is not a generally available product (at the time this was published) and UI for Blazor is available.

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After seeing all the “goodness” planned for KendoUI, I was fortunate to attend a session led by T.J. VanToll (@tjvantooll), Principal Developer Advocate at Progress. His session was titled “One Project, One Language, Three Apps.”. In this session, he focused on NativeScript and React Native and how they both can be used to build web, native iOS, and native Android applications. The demos were great, and he also covered when and when not to use each tool.

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The final ProgressNEXT technical session I attended was led by Carl Bergenhem (@carlbergenhem), Product Manager, Web Components @KendoUI and @KendoReact. In this session, Carl covered Blazor, the client-side .NET framework that runs on any browser. (Yes, c# executing in the browser!) Blazor utilizes the Mono .NET runtime implemented in WebAssembly that executes normal .NET assemblies in a browser. Carl did an awesome job introducing Blazor and how a .NET developer can leverage the technology in building applications.

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I had a great time at my first ProgressNEXT conference. The Progress team did a wonderful job with all aspects of this event. The venue, food, entertainment, scheduling, general and technical sessions were excellent. As a developer who was only familiar with the UI/UX tools Progress creates, attending ProgressNEXT has greatly expanded my perspective and understanding of the Progress ecosystem. I highly recommend attending ProgressNEXT and hope to see you at ProgressNEXT20, June 14-17, 2020 in Boston, MA.

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2017: What a Fantastic Year

In many ways, personally and professionally, 2017 has been a fantastic year for me.  Here is just some of the highlights: 

  • Started Charlotte Xamarin Developers meetup group.  As of today, we have 102 members.  I have big plans for this group in 2018
  • Continued leading Modern Devs Charlotte meetup group. As of today, we have 1,007 members.
  • Presented at 13 conferences/events on Angular, .NET/.NET Core, ASP.NET/ASP.NET Core, Xamarin, and Azure
  • Awarded the Telerik/Progress Developer Expert designation
  • Received the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award in the Visual Studio and Development Technologies category
  • Interviewed for the podcast Developer On Fire
  • Visited Alaska for the first time
  • Started a new position as Director of Engineering at SentryOne
  • My son graduated from college with a BS in Computer Science and will start fulltime in 2018 as a Jr. Software Engineer at SentryOne
  • and many more…

As I reflect on this past year, there is no doubt I have been extremely blessed and I am thankful.  I have had some incredible experiences and have met some incredible people.  Many have given me opportunities, helped me, and put their trust and faith in me. I could not have done it without your support.  To you I say “Thank You!”

Looking forward to 2018, I plan to do even more to give back.  The tech community is a real passion of mine.  I find it incredibly exciting to share what I have learned and see others use that knowledge to do great things.

So 2017, I bid you farewell, it has been fantastic.  To 2018, watch out, I am “going hard” to make it even more fantastic than 2017.

 

Keep Right’in Code!

Richard