VSLive San Francisco Wrap-Up

I am finally getting a handle on the post-VSlive backlog...

This year's VSLive San Francisco was another good event.  There was the usual fun (and education) meeting old friends and colleagues.  There was also meeting new faces to old acquiantences - such as Sam Gentile, whose blog I always read, but had never met face-to-face before.

My two sessions, VB Worst Practices and Data Access Strategies and Tactics, both went very well, with good attendence, good responses, and good questions/discussions afterwards (especially after the Data Access session).

The Microsoft .NET was OK - not much new for me here.  That is probably because I have heard and discussed all of these topics already, some multiple times.  It was interesting, however, to hear Soma live, as I have been tracking his blog for a while.

The big news of the conference was the Indigo Day - this was basically Indigo's "coming out" party.   I will share my thoughts on this in a separate posting.

Finally, there was some genuine interest and excitement around the release of the Enterprise Library.  I did my part to help encourage this, but I also did some formal and informal lobbying to have the source code available and supported for VB as well, so I wouldn't be so disappointed.

 

Published Monday, February 21, 2005 11:48 PM by Jackie Goldstein
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Comments

Monday, February 21, 2005 9:57 AM by TrackBack

# Understanding Indigo

Tuesday, February 22, 2005 2:00 AM by Justin N.

# re: VSLive San Francisco Wrap-Up

I was at your VB Worst Practices and Data Access Strategies and Tactics workshops. I thought that they, along with Rocky's workshops(generics, yeah!), were the most informative out of all the workshops. Great touch with the Jeopardy spoof. I just wish there were more of those types of workshops, rather than the seemingly endless advertisement for Team System(I can't believe the requirements for that thing). I have to present to all the developers at my company on information that I received at the conference, and thanks to you and Rocky, that will be no problem at all. I just started with this company about 5 months ago and it's been a real struggle getting these old procedural VB coders to see the error of their ways in trying to simply just plug in their old VB style coding into VB.Net without really thinking about all the things that .NET brings to the table. I turned Option Strict On one of our projects today just to see how bad it was, let's just say the compiler wasn't even able to handle that many errors. I am having an influence on them though. I've finally got them to start to realize the virtues of OO programming and got them to create their first .NET class library(don't everybody clap at once). I'm trying my hardest to get them to use stored procedures a whole lot more. I can still remember what you said "...all I'm going to say is that you highly recommend that you used stored procedures." You don't even want to see all the SQL code strewn all over the, I hate to even say this, ASP.NET pages. I think that they think that DAL is just the abbreviation for a city in Texas. Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks for the firepower. One question - are your powerpoints available anywhere?
Tuesday, February 22, 2005 2:48 AM by Jackie Goldstein

# re: VSLive San Francisco Wrap-Up

Justin,

Thanks for your kind words - I'm glad you found the sessions useful.

Funny, but someone else came up to me after the Data Access session and wanted me to explain to him why Rocky and I seem to be saying different things. Rocky and I have talked about this topic and we don't really disagree - other than the fact that I am a much bigger advocate of using DataSets for many applications than Rocky is (although he has come around a little, due to the improvements in VS2005).

You are definitely facing a "fun" challenge - that of moving the mindset of developers from VB6 to VB.NET. I spend alot of time and effort doing this...

You should be able to download the slides from the VSLive conference site - if you have any problems or questions, just shoot me an email.