March 2004 - Posts
The Post Conference session is tomorrow, but most folks have gone home. So, was it worth it? I think so. In fairness, I need to say I got here as a Press person, covering the event for blogs.mobilizedsoftware.com, and so I did not pay for the conference. I did, however, pay for the travel and lodging, and I missed a week of billable work (I am an independent contractor).
As I mentioned here I do think that taking responsibility for your own career is everyone's responsibility (especially software developers), What did I learn?
I went to Josh Holmes' session on Code DOM. I could have saved a great deal of grief on a recent project had I seen this talk 6 months ago. Next time, I will be ready. I learned about how to get the best performance out of the Compact Framework, and I learned a great deal about SQL Server CE SQL Server Mobile, both the current version and the next. A chance meeting with a vendor may end up getting me connected with someone who was not even here at the conference who happens to know something about using Speech Recognition for Medical Transcription, something I was on the lookout for at the request of a client.
And that is the great thing about going to a developers conference. Sometimes the sessions are crap (I was at a snoozer or two) but overall, the interaction with peers and the chance meetings that can happen with a large number of technical people in one place is totally worth figuring out how to get to a conference whenever one that is appropriate to the work you do is available
Here is my take on the keynote from MDC/VSLive given by Bill Gates today. Nothing really new for those paying attention, though some of the VB demos showed off Edit and Continue as well as using Code Snippets. This link requires a free registration to view it...
While flying cross country heading to the Microsoft Mobile DevCon Monday I had the opportunity to finish reading through the .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference. Most folks will likely buy a copy of the Annotated Reference for themselves or their team and leave it on the shelf referring to it when needed. This is probably an OK use of this book, but better is to actually look through the book's reference pages. Generally the actual reference material is not significantly different than what you could find online at MSDN, however the annotations add value that places this book ahead of your average reference.
The folks annotating the standard library are the folks involved with creating and standardizing the library. They include Brad Adams, Anders Hejlsberg, Brial Grunkemeyer, Joel Marcey, Kit George, Krzysztof Cwalina and Jeffery Richter. Ever wonder why the Exception parameter to the Constructor for an InvalidProgramException is called inner rather than innerException (which is tthe name in virtually all other exceptions)? Just a mistake. Why is Cancel not present in the IAsynchResult interface? Not all operations can reliably be cancelled, and it is bad interface design to have an interface that some classes that need to implement the interface cannot support. Even inconsistencies (like the fact that Reset is a member of IEnumerator, allowing a class to throw a NotSupportedException if the class cannot support Reset).
Wart and all, the information in the annotations are clearly the best part of the book. Highly recommended.
UPDATE: The book is even more useful than I originally thought. I was making a post in my other blog here, and I needed to find where a particular example was in the book. The index did not help me, but the CD included that has the entire book fully searchable did. Load this one up on your PC, and you will reference it more than you can imagine.
I will mostly be blogging about the Microsoft Mobile Developers Conference on my Mobilized Software blog.
Will anyone be out there Monday evening? I will be getting in a 3:00 PM or so and staying at the Crowne Plaza. Drop me a comment here if you are around and looking for something to do Monday evening.
Here is a pointer to a review of SQL Compare from Red-Gate Software in my other blog. If you have to keep a remote SQL Server up to date with Stored Procedure/Table structure changes, this is a pretty neat product.
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