Day 3 was the best day overall, so far. I started with Dan Wahlin's "Migrating from Web Services to SOAs". He focused on the fact that SOA is an architecture strategy rather than a tool. I think a lot of people equate SOA to Web Services, and that is a limited point of view. WS may be the best way to implement SOA today, but we need to think of it like that -- just an implementation. The more I consider SOA, the more I appreciate the need to look at this as an option for many enterprise solutions. Like any other technology getting a lot of focus, though, I'm afraid that many people will try mapping everything to SOA solutions, and that would be a mistake. I'll write about this more in the future. Anyway, Dan had a lot to cover, and 75 minutes just doesn't cover it.
Next was Juval Lowe's "Programming Windows Comminucation Foundation - A Developer's Primer", which help define the latest generation of WS, remoting, etc., building upon Dan's talk. Juval is one of the official "legends", and again he proved why. He has a knack for clearly explaining complex topics, transcending any issues some people may have understanding him through his accent. Each time he was on .NET Rocks!, I started out afraid he would be talking above my head, but each time I came away with a definite understanding of the topics he discussed. I had the same experience with his articles. My co-worker recommended taking a seminar of his for the past year, and ironically he paged me for help on a production issue exactly at this time. I'll never let him live this down ;).
Next up was another legend, Dan Appleman, for "Tracing and Logging in .NET." Wow -- I cannot believe I never made use of this stuff before. My head is spinning with all the things we could have done on our last project. This must get in next version. But this is definitely one of those technologies you have to play with after the seminar to get a grasp on all the options (and idiosyncrities). I highly recommend looking at the tracing technology in 2.0.
In a day of legends, Kathleen Dollard was next with "Improve Your .NET and Visual Studio 2005 Debugging Skills." She clarified at the top of the session that this is not an advanced topic, and that a lot of it was teaching us how to think, instead of using the tools. But it remained a standing-room-only session. Kathleen rocks! She goes 100 mph, and is very intense. She pointed out several non-obvious tools. Especially helpful was the Exceptions dialog available from the Debug menu. I'm looking forward to seeing her on .NET Rocks! live, tomorrow.
Finally, there was the whacked-out Mark Miller and his "Extending Visual Studio" session, where he was showing off how you can easily add plug-ins to VS through his company's free tool, which name escapes me for the moment. I'll post it as soon as I find it. Within the last 20 minutes of the session, he added a drop-down in the code editor for displaying graphics in comments. Between his hyperactive coding, and the use of his amazing CodeRush tool, you had to focus 100%, otherwise you'd miss it. He'll make the code available for anyone who wants to play around with it. Very cool stuff!
Day 2 was a mixed bag. The keynote given by Prashant Sridharan was entertaining, and I have got to check out the rest of the VS 2005 ad campaign he gave us a glimpse at. The stats of downloads and popularity of 2005 is impressive. I hope we continue to see the widespread acceptance of .NET in the field. There will always be detractors, but there have been a LOT of converts.
The first session I was to attend was "Deep Dive into ObjectDataSource", and was supposed to be given by Stefan Schackow. Unfortunately, there was a last minute change of speakers. I don't remember his name, but he was very hard to understand, and rushed through the material. He seemed to know his stuff, but I started nodding off way too often (even more than usual for me).
Adding insult to injury, when I got to the second session, which I was looking forward to ("Creating Dynamic Web Sites with ASP .NET 2.0 Web Parts", I discovered that it was swapped with the first session, so I missed it. If I only knew -- I would have skipped the ObjectDataSource session for this. Oh, well. So instead, I went to Keith Smith's "Web Application UI Integrating Master Pages". Keith was very good, with a lot of enthusiasm. I wish he had time to cover everything he wanted; he seemed rushed in the second half. I learned a lot from this. I didn't realize how powerful this is.
I was pleasantly surprised when I realized Keith was also giving the next session I went to after lunch -- "Using Visual Studio Team System to Build Enterprise ASP .NET Web Applications." My company is seriously considering TS, and this session definitely gave me incentive to look at this sooner rather than later. I had bought the "Open Source .NET Development" book a day earlier (amazing selection of books being sold here, by the way), because I wanted to compare some of the incredible looking open source tools for agile .NET development as a possible alternative to some of the TS tools. I had heard that MS's first try with TS was "nice try, but not quite there yet." That may be true, but I still think it's worth diving into.
Next was Mike Hernandez's "The Power of Office Development in Managed Code". I wanted to see MSTO in action, because we do some integration with Excel. Mike was also enthusiastic, and MSTO is definitely something worth looking into if your company makes a lot of use of MS Office. I just wish Outlook support looked more mature. I'd rather hook into Outlook from outside it than creating plug-ins. It's already overflowing.
I just had to check out Mark Miller and CodeRush at the DevExpress exhibitor booth. He is amazing, a workaholic (claims he hasn't had a vacation in over 10 years), and a maniac! He's also brilliant, and so seems CodeRush and Refactor. I hope I didn't bug him too much with all my questions. Probably not -- he recommended I come to his presentation later this week, which I planned on, anyway  . I know what I want for my birthday!
Finally, I attended Scott Guthrie's session, "Tips & Tricks for ASP .NET 2.0 and VS 2005." He is a legend, of course, and he has a great presence and delivery. A lot of cool stuff -- and all the sample code and slides are already linked to on his blog (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/04/03/441787.aspx). He comes prepared!
Well, I'm actually a day late posting this. My wife and I got in on Saturday to do the Disney thing, as per obligation for being in Orlando I'm basically Disneyed-out from past trips. I used to be addicted to Disney...but maybe that was tied to our daughter growing up a fan. Anyway...
I attended the pre-conference all-day ASP .NET 2.0 hands-on session given by Paul Litwin. I don't think he was on top of his game today. He seemed perhaps jet-lagged and not as prepared as I've seen him in the past. Dino Esposito was in attendance, and helped out a bit. I did benefit from it, though. Since I haven't been hands-on as I'd like these days, it's always a confidence boost when you can fly through all the labs. Maybe there's still something left in the programming tank after all
The focus was on 2.0-specific data controls, master pages & navigation, and login controls. These are core 2.0 topics, but they aren't very challenging. But it was still a good refresher.
The free wireless connection supposedly supplied by the conference did not work at all. We're still a couple of years away from true, reliable hotpoints, IMO.
Well, not that many people know who I am, yet...
But this is something I've looked forward to for years. The people presenting at this conference are stars to us .NET fans. I mean, Scott Guthrie, Dino Esposito, Billy Hollis, Nick Landry (who I had the pleasure of meeting at the NY Code Camp recently), Julia Lerman, Michele Leroux Bustamante, Juval Löwy, Kimberly Tripp, the legendary Dan Appleman, Kathleen Dollard, Carl Franklin (who gave me a couple of minutes of fame with a short interview on episode 67 of .NET Rocks! Ok, nobody remembers that ;) ), Rocky Lhotka, Mark Miller, Bill Vaughn -- I mean the people popping out of the front covers of our favorite books and .NET Rocks! episodes...you can't get much better than that, even at the Oscars!
Anyway, I hope to perhaps blog about it while I'm there. Now I need some sleep (and to empty my mind for a lot of learning).
I'm looking to start a .NET User Group in upper Westchester, NY (or anywhere in Westchester, if there isn't enough interest in upper Westchester / Putnam).
I occasionally go to the meetings in NYC or Stamford, CT, but quite frankly, it's a trip after a long day's work.
If you are interested, please post a comment here. I'm currently researching the steps I need to take to do this successfully, so any additional help would be greatly appreciated. I visited the ineta site for info, but found surprisingly little about how to start a UG. Maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way, but the site seems a bit disjointed.
Thanks.
We have a system which was written in VB6 way back when. Several cooperative components are involved. A couple of years ago, we rewrote the core components in .NET. A couple of the driver modules remained as VB6 applications due to time constraints, etc., as is typical in migration. But because these were the "calling" components, we had to resort to "reverse" interop. Basically, we have COM calling a .NET component.
As you probably already know, this requires us to mark the .NET project with Register for COM Interop. We mainly do xcopy deploys of our .NET applications, so call me slow or whatever, but the last step of the deployment was to run RegAsm.exe to register the generated .TLB file. This required me to copy that utility to the destination machine (dumb, I know). I think we got into this mode due to lack of time to research things correctly. Installation and deployment (like documentation) always seems to be an afterthought in a fast-moving business. Excuses, excuses...
Anyway, I finally took the time to read up on RegAsm.exe, and discovered that you can use the /regfile switch on the build machine to generate a .REG file that you can run on the destination machine to apply the required registry settings to register the .NET component for COM usage. Very cool, and allows me to just add it to the deployment script (we're moving away from simple xcopy deploys) using FinalBuilder (a future article, by the way).
I just got done with training this past week. And now my whining starts...
Hey, it's my blog, and I'll cry if I want to...
1) A one month course squashed into one week.
2) Although I understood the topics, and got a lot out of it, I suffered an inferiority complex when it came to the labs. I NEED TO CODE MORE!
3) The instructor -- brilliant and arrogant.
Ok...I made myself buy a VB .NET tutorial book when I was in NYC. And I will follow it step by step.
It takes experiences such as Rory Blyth had to remind me of this. Rory is one of the smartest and funniest people I have never met (but have communicated with from time to time). He works for Microsoft, and happens to be a big U2 fan (which is how we "met").
As he describes with his usual mix of humor and insight, no matter what us 21st century techno-dweebs think, humans are very bad at multi-tasking. I've been telling myself for years that I need to focus on one task at a time to become more productive and less stressed out. But some habits die hard.
I'm going to try it again. Otherwise, I may just explode.
Also, read this VERY related article: http://news.com.com/2102-1022_3-5637632.html?tag=st.util.print
Why do experts insist on making things so hard for others to understand? Is it a fear of losing their "expertise" label? Do they throw around buzzwords just to feel part of the "in" crowd?
Isn't there joy in being able to help the less enlightened person's eyes light up with understanding? Isn't it worthwhile to help another person share your appreciation and understanding for what you know so well?
Well, then why does so much of the teaching material available today suck? Why do I have to read explanations about a topic from five different books before I can really grok something? Is it that hard for people to remember how they felt when first learning something?
Yes, the situation has improved. There are some excellent technical writers these days, such as Mark Minasi, and Charles Petzold has always been clear. But the situation is still inconsistent at best. And way too many writers write like it hurts them to do so -- obviously they're in it to capitalize on being the first ones out with a book on a topic.
Where am I going with this?
I want to change this. I have an idea for a website that will attempt to teach without being condescending or obtuse. I grabbed the URL a few years ago, but never used it. It may take me another six months to a year to start it, though. You see, I'm procrastinating again. But I know why -- a few reasons:
- I want to learn ASP .NET enough to write the site using that.
- I didn't want to start the site with just a topic or two.
- I wanted to start this site initially to help me learn .NET -- it was going to be one of my tools for learning it. But it would require me to actually learn a topic or two inside-out.
Obviously, these are lame reasons for not starting the site:
- Uh, DUH -- how do I think I'm going to LEARN ASP .NET??
- Who cares? Do I think I need to document everything in the framework before I start?
- Double-DUH -- see # 1.
Like I warned you -- this blog is for helping me to kick my own ass.
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