November 2007 - Posts
We're having lots of fun at DevTeach, and the mood was bubbly at Beth Massi's presentation on the new features in VB 9.0.
You see, the big boss of DevTeach, Jean-René Roy, opened the beer cooler for the whole crowd in mid-afternoon. You can imagine that such generosity might influence the business-like atmosphere of the day's remaining sessions.
While Beth was demonstrating LINQ, she had uncharacteristic trouble with the Aggregation syntax... until she discovered that the From keyword was getting in the way.
What do you blame when your demonstration is hitting glitches? "That beer," she said, pointing to the bottle of suds near her laptop. "It's calling to me and distracting me."
When one member of the audience invited Beth to "Have some more beer!", Beth insisted, "I've only drank down to the neck." I believed Beth, even after she punctuated her presentation with 'crowd roar' sound effects close in on the microphone.
BTW, Beth did raise a valid aside during the LINQ to XML part of the talk: Why does Internet Explorer consider an XML file worthy of a security warning?
After Aaron Marten's talk on Visual Studio 2008 extensibility this afternoon, we were chatting about some possible examples and power tools for the shell. I piped up that I'd like something that would give me some control over the recent files/projects and the Start page. James Lau, Lead Program Manager from the Visual Studio Tools Ecosystem group commented that such an add-in "wouldn't be difficult."
Well James, I warned you: the challenge is out there! It doesn't have to be feature rich - just let me get rid of project names that I don't want to see any more.
No rush on this, Friday would be fine for the add-in. After all, even though this is a frequently-requested feature and a pain point in the IDE, I wouldn't want to put any pressure on you guys! <grin>
While taking in the technical content here at DevTeach Vancouver, I've been watching out for speakers who are knowledgeable and highly entertaining at the same time. When you're sitting in an airless hotel meeting room, the presenters who can keep you truly engaged for 45-55 minutes are the ones you want to see again and recommend to others.
Top marks of the day (in the sessions I attended) go to Richard Campbell and Kent Alstad who were excellent even in the deadly last-session-of-the-day slot. Don't miss hearing Richard speak. He keeps things hopping with his high energy, big voice, dramatic gestures, and funny interjections ("Consultant... that's what you get when merging 'con game' and 'insult'"). Kent plays off Richard very well with great timing, talking about his job "Killing Web Servers for Fun and Profit." (The talk was on "The Scaling Habits of ASP.NET Applications".)
Another speaker you should catch whenever you can is Microsoft's John Bristowe who moves things along at a real clip. I attended two of his well-prepared sessions today. John's another guy with a booming voice and an infectious enthusiasm for whatever he's talking about. John's not afraid to poke fun at his employer's products, describing Notepad as "a presentation tool we ship with Windows". When Visual Studio 2008 was slow loading during his demo, John described it as a Windows Vista "Process Wait" feature. John's joke of the day for conference speakers is that if you want to "guarantee high evaluations for your presentation", wow the audience by pressing the Ctrl key in VS2008 while the IntelliSense drop-down list is showing. (IntelliSense becomes transparent.)
Sure it's a technical conference but that doesn't mean it can't be entertaining.
Hey gang, I need some support here.
I'm in the author review phase of ASP.NET 3.5 For Dummies. In a chapter on LINQ, an editor wants me to change 'Thingy' to "a more concrete noun".
Here's an example heading:
Narrowing the thingys with a Select clause
Wait a minute! This is the For Dummies series where you even have an icon to mark 'Technical Stuff'. Is 'Thingy' not a synonym for 'Stuff'?
What's more, we're dealing with LINQ here and especially anonymous types. Doesn't a vague 'Thingy' reference makes sense when you're letting the compiler determine what concrete type the 'thingy' is?
The real issue, to me, is my original misspelling of Thingys in the heading. It looks like it should have been Thingies. I'll let the editors correct me on that.
Heck, let's make Thingy a keyword in the next version of VB!
Your thoughts?
Wow! Check out the free Rich Text Editor control for ASP.NET on CodePlex. What a great contribution to the community.
You can download the source code here.
Announcements about Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 are gradually coming out. Soma confirms that the products will release to manufacturing by the end of the month. More info here:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/default.aspx
The public relations release is set for the end of February. I guess that's when you can buy a DVD with all the packaging and artwork on it.
Interesting to note that integration partners will get a look at the VS 2008 source code.
Ken
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