Well, last night we did the Disney thing again, since the sessions ended pretty early.  We're into the calm rides -- you know, Spaceship Earth, It's a Small World, etc.  Our rollercoaster days are long gone.  We did want to do the new hang gliding (?) simulation at The Land in EPCOT, but the wait was too long.

Today was the final day at DevConnections, and it was a full day course that was worth the cost of the whole thing.  Juval Lowe taught the "Master C# and Visual Studio 2005" session, and who else but the master should teach this?  Wow.  Juval exudes confidence at a level some people may take as arrogance.  But that would be misinterpreted.  He is no-nonsense, get directly to the point, take no prisoners sort of guy, and I find it extremely refreshing.  And damn if he doesn't know his stuff!

I learned more about generics than I wanted to know, tips about VS that are great to know, more about iterators than you should be allowed to know, on top of delegate inference, anonymous methods, C# refactoring, and much more.  It is amazing how much this guy squeezed into a single day.  I can only imagine how I'd feel after taking a full week of IDesign (his company) master training.  Oh, and if you want to download a free, full version of "My" for C# ("That"), go to their site at www.idesign.net.  And you can download dozens of other great tools and examples.  These guys (and gals) are the masters.

I have not seen an entire class so transfixed for an entire day.  The concentration on every word Juval spoke was intense.  And you knew everyone was at full attention, because of the breakout of laughter just when Juval would sneak in a joke.  He has a wicked sense of humor that catches you off guard.

At the end of the session, not a soul moved.  When Juval asked if we had any questions, everyone sat transfixed, hoping someone would ask a question so the session wouldn't end.  After several questions, we finally did end, and a few of us went up to speak to him a while longer.  One guy asked him how we could learn to be better architects; what books he recommended, websites, anything.  Juval's answer could have been taken as a sales pitch for his company's courses, but it was very truthful -- he stated that the best way today that he could think of becoming a top-notch architect is to learn from a master.  He said that it was how he got to where he is today.  Earlier in his career, he had reached a plateau.  And only when he found a job where he found himself a mentor, did he begin to gain the knowledge and experience he has today.  I thought it was a nice contrast to his obvious current expertise that he admitted to needing a mentor himself.  He also made it a point to say that in order to become a successful architect, you must not be introverted.  You must become an extrovert, and excude the confidence you need to project in order to get to the next level.  I agree with him wholeheartedly.

Juval also made another interesting point, and again I'm paraphrasing here -- he said that his editor at O'Reilly told him that a book with the word "design" in its title is the kiss of death, and that's why there is very little material on architecture.  The money is in specific programming (read: coding) specialties.  He also has a strong opinion about the Microsoft Enterpise Library and their code blocks, in general (and he has a point).  He's not a fan because the people who wrote them don't work in real world apps.  He thinks that there's a lot of smart people at Microsoft who do a lot of things right when it comes to many of the tools, but that when coming up with real-world design solutions, they are the wrong people to be doing it.

I should have asked him why they haven't asked him to help.  He's worked closely with them, so why not help them come up with real-world tools?

Anyway, Yuval is a big reason why I look forward to taking an architecture course from his team.  In my opinion, nobody else in the world qualifies.  It's the next best thing to having him as a mentor.  Now, back to reading his book...