November 2004 - Posts
One of the more interesting and surprising feedbacks that I got from my presentation on .NET Worst Practices at the
.NET Deep Dive developer event was how many experienced .NET developers didn't realize the significance of the difference between "throw" and "throw ex" (both in C# and VB). I thought that I would explain and show it here, but one of the conference attendees (and an XML MVP) already did it forme on his blog - so check out
Oleg's entry that summarizes my explanation of this issue. He also includes a comparison to the Throw keyword in Java.
November's Israel Visual Basic User Group Meeting will be held on December1, 2004:
17:30 - 18:00 Assembly
18:00 - 18:10 Introduction
18:10 - 19:30 “New Features for Developers in SQL Server 2005 – Part 1"
Dubi Lebel, Microsoft Israel
19:30 - 19:45 Break
19:45 - 20:00 "Hatzilu !"
Open session, with questions and answers/ideas from everyone
20:00 – 21:00 “New Features for Developers in SQL Server 2005 – Part 2"
Dubi Lebel, Microsoft Israel
More details can be found on the
web site.
I hope to see you there !
I have fallen behind a bit on my blogging - but that is good news. Business activity is really picking up and keeping me very, very busy. I was in New York to formally sign a contract for a new project that will be developed with VS2005 and have several other potential projects in various stages of negotiations that need to be attended to. Upon my return I also had to finish up final preparations for the Microsoft Israel .NET Deep Dive event which I helped manage and spoke at. More on that in my next post.
A nice surprise that awated me when I returned was the fact that my article on DataSets in ADO.NET 2.0 was featured on the MSDN Home Page.
I have a long list of topics that I want to blog about - I hope to work my way throught that list over the next week or so.
Yesterday we broke a new record for a single-day Microsoft developer event in Israel. It was tagged .NET Deep Dive and consisted of 2 parallel tracks: (1) Practices and Utilities and (2) Hardcore Programming, preceeded by a keynote on some new Team System features of VS2005. What was amazing was the number of attendes that showed up - over 1,600 !!
I did a presentation on .NET Worst Practices, focussing on common coding errors and issues. It was particularly fun for me, since (despite my VB passion) I did half of the content/demos in VB and half in C#. Also, although I usually spend most of my time running around the world talking about new/future MS tools and technologies, it was very refreshing and appealing to attendees to talk only about shipping technologies (with only 2 or 3 minor references to .NET 2.0).
I have been involved in organizing and speaking at MS Israel events, as I was for this one, for almost 8 years - ever since I was responsible for running the first Developer Days event in Israel in 1997. For that event, we were thrilled to have gotten 700 attendees - today that number would probably be considered a failure. Over the years MS Israel has really learned how to do these events "in their sleep", although there is clearly a ton of logistial and organizational work required to make them happen.
I really think that yesterday's event reached a new high, not only in terms of pure numbers, but also in attendee satisfaction. Except for the opening keynote on VS2005, all of the other 8 sessions only addressed real-world issues with currently shipping products and technologies. I think people really enjoyed these sessions that were clearly much more technical than marketing. The afternoon sessions seemed to be particularly strong as indicated by the fact that the vast majority of the attendees stayed until the end of the day, which is not usually the case for a free event like this.
My article on the new DataSet features in ADO.NET 2.0 has gone live on MSDN.
From the Introduction:
This article is actually the first of two articles on the DataSet and associated classes in ADO.NET 2.0. Here we will focus on the classes in the .NET Framework. In the subsequent article, we will focus on developing with these and related classes from within the Visual Studio 2005 development environment. Visual Studio 2005 offers several designers and tools that offer tremendous flexibility and productivity for developing the data-centric aspects of your application. As a result, each article will have a different "feel". This article is mainly an overview of new functionality, accompanied by explanations and code samples. In the next article, the focus is more on the development process, as we see how to develop a working application.
I almost never need to program against an Oracle database, but I get asked alot of questions by people who do. This
new article compares the Microsoft .NET Data Provider for Oracle against the Oracle Data Provider for .NET. It is a long, comprehensive and well laid-out article and is definitely one you want to review before choosing an Oracle data provider.
Last night, the Israel Visual Basic User Group (IVBUG) celebrated its seventh birthday! I'll include some pictures from our meeting/party at the end of this post.
I must say, that the continued success of this User Group is something in which I take a lot of pride. Seven years ago, nobody in Israel, certainly not in the Microsoft world, had any idea of what a User Group with monthly meetings was. From speaking to people I knew, I saw that there was definitely interest, and I also got support/sponsorship from Microsoft.
Over the years, I made some very good friends from people at these meetings and we looked forward to our monthly live get-together. I was also fortunate that over the years many different talented and nice people chose to become regular attendees at these meetings. We have helped each other solve and/or evaluate many tricky problems and issues.
Based on the model and success of this User Group, more than a dozen other groups focussing on MS tools and technologies have started up here. I hope that they all continue to have as much success, and fun, as I have had, hosting and attending these monthly meetings.
Earlier this week I send out an email to numerous friends and colleagues with a great cartoon on blogging. I have since seen it on at least one recipient's blog, so I figured I should post it here as well.
Yag has a post with a list of Microsoft products that are developed, at least partially, with .NET code. The list is actually somewhat longer than I had realized. His post is in response to a claim that .NET Winforms is not really "ready for prime time" since MS isn't developing all of their products in .NET. His counter-claim is most reasonable - if not obvious.
It is only at the very end of the post that yag states/confirms something that I have been saying (screaming ?) for at least 4 years now - the reason the majority of applications in Microsoft are developed in C#, rather than VB.NET, is not because C# is a better language. It is because most MS developers were previously C/C++ developers. That is exactly what I would tell my clients - if your team is experienced with C/C++/Java - go with C#. Otherwise, go with VB.NET.
In my post last night, I mentioned that I had written a compiler in VB6. If the idea of writing your own compiler intrigues you, you can see some (rather simple) examples that come with the .NET Framework SDK. Look for them at
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\SDK\v1.1\Tool Developers Guide\Samples
The samples are for mini versions of C, C++, and Lisp (remember Lisp?!). The code itself is written in C# and C++. Maybe I should write VB versions...
If you have never studied any compiler theory or read up on it, it would probably be a good idea to do a little reading before diving into the code, so that at least you know the basic concepts and vocabulary.
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