The Modern Web Tour: A Recap

We recently hit the road on our Modern Web Tour in Berlin, Zurich and Munich. Learn about the speakers, what we covered and help us choose where to go next time!

In late July, I packed my bags and made my way across the pond for The Modern Web Tour. This whirlwind trip had three stops in three days – Berlin, Zurich and Munich. In each city, some of the brightest minds in the modern web space – Christian Weyer, Laurent Bugnion, Jessica Engstrom, Jimmy Engstrom, Sam Basu, and Richard Campbell – entertained and educated attendees of the free events.

Richard, the master storyteller that he is, started each event with a talk that covered the History of the Web, including the story of the World Wide Web and the web development tools and techniques that made it all possible. He chronicled the early versions of HTML where you laid out web pages with tables (GeoCities anyone?) and simple scripting languages to CSS, JavaScript and HTML 5, leading to Single Page Applications, Progressive Web Apps and Web Assembly. While most of the people in the audience lived the history he shared, they were engaged and captivated by the narrative.

In Berlin, Christian detailed new ways to build real cross-platform, native-like web-based client applications together with lightweight Cloud architectures. He gave a practical introduction to the WebAssembly and Serverless computing in Azure.

In Zurich and Munich, Laurent gave a technical tour of the new Microsoft by detailing ASP.NET Core, Serverless, Linux on Azure, Web Assembly and more.

Sam closed out the technical presentations with a talk entitled “Modern Web Development with Polished UI.” His talk is built on the premise that .NET developers have always had rich tooling to build web apps, but as the success of the modern web impacts the ASP.NET technology stack, maybe it is time to revisit our options – WebForms, MVC, Razor, .NET Core – paired with JS. He then demonstrated how Progress, with its Telerik .NET and Kendo UI JavaScript tools, can help build modern apps with a polished UI.

And if all that wasn’t enough, we closed out each day with a live recording of .NET Rocks! In Berlin, Richard interviewed Jessica Engstrom. In Zurich he chatted with Laurent Bugnion, and in Munich, he talked with Jimmy Engstrom. The audience not only got to hear the interviews live (recordings will hit the airwaves this month), but they got to see how the shows are made and be part of the studio audience.

As with any trip that finds you in three distinct cities in three days, we did our best to have some fun while not in the conference centers. We all flew together from Berlin to Zurich but opted for a more scenic route from Zurich to Munich. We couldn’t have asked for a more beautiful day as we piled into two cars and one motorcycle and drove from Switzerland to Germany. We made a stop in Liechtenstein for ice cream, coffee, and passport stamps, and then cut through Austria before speeding down the autobahn into Munich.

If you missed the events – either because you live nowhere near the three cities we visited or because the weather was absolutely gorgeous in Germany and Switzerland the week we were there and you went on an impromptu holiday – let us know where you would like us to bring the tour next time around. We’d love to meet as many of you in person as we can and share our thoughts and experience around the Modern Web.

And, as always, if you are interested in UI tools for your modern web applications, make sure you check out the Progress Telerik .NET and Kendo UI JavaScript libraries. We offer a free 30-day trial, complete with support.

Hope to see you on a future Modern Web Tour stop!