Juval Lowy Talk

Spent a couple of hours listening to Juval. He is a very knowledgeable presenter. I wish I was half as well versed on any topic. The topic was Generics in C# 2.0. The talk went significantly deeper than anything that I had heard before. Some of the capabilities are significantly different to anything that I have seen before so I think that I need a while to digest. I really need to try a few things out. The only way to learn about these things is to use them.

Code Camp: Web Presentation Design Patterns part I

This was really about implementing Model-View-Controller in ASP.NET. The interesting thing about ASP.NET is that it comes with a fully extensible controller in the form of the Page class. There are some interesting things that you can do with specializations of the Page class. Checkout the source when it is available: www.MSDNCodeCamp.com there are some good practices demonstrated.

Code Camp: COM Interop

This was probably the most in depth of the presentations that I attended. Sam Gentile did an excellent job of introducing the subject.

There are some major incongruities between the COM and .Net programming models. The most serious of these is over life time issues and the garbage collector. .Net must be able to decrement reference counts other than just at finalization time. IDisposable is the obvious choice for this but it is unclear to me why the Interop Wrappers do not support this. The general message was that if you want it to work right you have to dig in a little deeper.

I actually have personal experience of this. I was playing with some images that were stored in a COM object. They were using a significant amount of memory. They would go away when the GC fired but the GC was never firing because the managed heap was only a few hundred bytes and the COM heap was hundreds of megabytes..

New England Code Camp

I just spent my entire weekend at the New England Code Camp. This was a great event lots of very knowledgeable presenters. There were a few less capable presenters but that just encourages me to present at a future event...

Keep tuned for some of my comments on individual presentations and the things that I learnt from them.

Beantown User Group Meeting

Thursday night was the meeting of the Downtown Boston User group. Chris Bowen was presenting on Agile development in .NET. It was a very quick overview of agile development with a quick demo of NUnit and TestDriven.NET. Chris was also moderating one of the rooms at the Cabana the previous night. It sounds like Monster have been moving towards .Net in a very measured way. They have some favorite tools: NUnit of coarse, CruiseControl for monitoring and tracking changes.

I think that I will give TestDriven.NET a try after his recommendation but I tried VSNUnit and didn't end up using it much. I guess that I really like that green bar!

Cabana night

I attended the Cabana night on Wednesday, hosted by Microsoft. A big thanks to Chris Pels and Thom Robbins for organizing it.

I moved around the rooms to get a feel for the different topics. I was impressed by the expertise, particularly Andy Kelly in the database room who had a good answer for every question whilst I was in the room. The most useful part for me personally was a section in the enterprise architecture room in which peoples favorite tools were discussed. There are too many tools out there to be familiar with them all and it is great to hear a variety of other peoples experiences.

This is a great format especially the smaller groups but the moderators have to keep on top of things and ensure that everyone gets some attention. What you get out of these meetings is largely determined by the attendees themselves which is very different from the more conventional speaker meeting.