.NET at 9.400 ft above sea level

PDC first impressions

I got here at 8:15 in the morning and there were a number of people around. The registration process went on smoothly except for a small glitch in the software: my last name is Sánchez, with a tilde in the a and that was too much for the registration software, but after a while the ladies at the desk figured it out and everything went OK. Now I've got my official PDC bag and shirt. The bag was full with the usual CDs and propaganda (but no Whidbey or Longhorn bits until tomorrow, sorry) and a heavy copy of Writing Secure Code 2nd Edition. Perhaps tellingly, the only big line here was at the Starbucks station. Commnet is working just right, there are 40 or 50 people in the room and probably more using wireless outside and now I have an hour or so to make up my mind about whether I shell out the almost $200 extra to get to the pre-conference sessions. Back to you when I have something more useful to report.

My favorite presentation format

G. Andrew Duthie makes a good question about a presentation format: "Do you prefer to have a presenter write the code live, or do you prefer to have the presenter show a pre-written example, and explain how the important parts work?". As he gives us ample opportunity to ask for the "perfect" format, here goes my 2 cents:

• A minimum of slides, with diagrams or graphics showing things like architecture, purpose and relationships. No bulleted text if at all possible.
• Small examples created live showing that basic concepts are really simple to use.
• One sophisticated example where we can see how the whole thing works in a realistic scenario and how you are supposed to use the new feature together with things like exceptions, logging, etc.

I know this is probably too much to ask for (especially the last point) but may be a presenter or two will take notice (and if they do I will certainly blog about it!).

Guess who will be at the Smart Clients BOF

Life *is* full of surprises: a few days ago I hardly managed to go to the PDC, then I was appointed to "cover" the data-driven apps panel (which basically means I'll be in charge of passing the microphone), and now the uber-RD Tim Huckaby accepted me as volunteer in the Smart Clients BOF, where I will have to take questions from very real and scary geeks, luckily Tim will be the moderator and he offered to protect this South American soul, so now I'm counting the days but for very different motivations...

ASP to ASP.NET Migration Assistant

Bjarne Stroustrup on structs vs. classes

This article is really dedicated to C++ but have some really useful insight on when to use structs instead of classes (in C# for example). Usually, this discussion revolves around where structs and classes are instantiated (the stack and the heap) and performance in general, but here Bjarne defines and exemplifies invariants and in so doing proposes a very nice object-oriented way of choosing one or another. One more design pattern to my bag.

Introducing Generics in the CLR

The MSDN site notifies me that MSDN Magazine has published an article on generics, one of the most touted new features of .NET Framework 2.0; among other things, it tells us that even if we can't get a copy of Whidbey, we can still play with generics thanks to Gyro. Of course, a nicer way of getting the real thing is going to the PDC. By the way, the article is not precisely new (as a matter of fact it even has a sequel) I just didn't notice it before, oh well, that's what happens when you don't use the corresponding RSS feed...

PDC Panels: me too

A quick summary of .NET Rocks' Scott Guthrie on ASP.NET 2.0

I just finished listening to .NET Rocks! interview to Scott Guthrie on Whidbey's ASP.NET 2.0, here follows a quick summary (probably full of mistakes and misunderstandings). To keep it short, I've concentrated in the what's not in the how's, why's, how far's or when's.

1. You will be able to drag a SQL Server table and drop it into a page, which will give you a data binded datagrid, mostly through property manipulation, the grid will be sortable, editable and updatable
2. One goal of ASP.NET 2.0 is to reduce the amount of code needed by 70-75%, Scott thinks Whidbey will get very close to that mark
3. Another goal is to simplify administration, ASP.NET 2.0 will offer a rich configuration API along with rich admin tools, in the bottom you will still have good old XML config files
4. We will get Intellisense in config files and in code embedded in web forms (as opposed to code-behind classes)
5. We will get some 40 new controls, including things like a rich treeview and security controls (authentication). Controls will work with both two-tier and three-tier data models.
6. Next releases of Commerce Server, Sharepoint Server and Content Management Server will use all these new facilities
7. We will have building blocks APIs services, like for example: membership services, role management and a personalization system
8. This APIs will use a provider model, so that you can create, for example, your own credentials provider and replace the one that's used out of the box by the authentication block (SQL Server tables, it seems)
9. The template columns design-time editor will get a major update, including two-way databinding and custom controls that can be dragged and dropped into the column (for example, drop-downs)
10. They're striving to have 100% backwards compatibility with ASP.NET 1.0 and 1.1
11. ASP.NET 2.0 will be 64-bit enabled
12. It will support IIS 5.0 and up, Windows Server 2000 and up
13. In particular, IIS 6.0 will allow two use the ASP.NET authentication information to control access to classic ASP pages and even other resources like images or JSP pages
14. An administrator could be notified by e-mail every time a certain exception raises
15. Nothing to do with ASP.NET 2.0: in a few weeks a utility to convert classic ASP pages to ASP.NET will be available at www.asp.net
16. Enterprise Services will allow you to start/stop a transaction at any fixed point in your code, you will not be constrained to object boundaries
17. There will be a data access layer designer which will allow you to choose tables, views, add properties and then access all this elements in a strongly-typed way
18. Alternatively, you will be able to use Object Spaces, which is an object-relational mapping tool that will be released as part of Whidbey
19. Yukon and Whidbey have the same release timeframe
20. To create Yukon user-defined types you will be able to use any CLR value class (C# struct)
21. The Cache object will be enhanced so that you can, for example, make a dataset valid as long as the underlaying source (a table, usually) doesn't change.
22. Whidbey is currently in alpha, an early beta will be available (may be) in the spring of 2004
23. Check out for a special section on Whidbey that will appear at www.asp.net
24. All the stuff discussed in the interview, probably doesn't cover more than a 2% of all the new things in Whidbey

As I said, this list could have a number of mistakes and misundersanding so I urge to listen to the interview or, better yet, go to the PDC and get the early Whidbey bits.

Visual Studio Tools for Office is here

And for those of you with a MSDN subscription, you can download it right now.

I'll be there even if I have to pay myself