I am tired of being marketed to...............

I saw where someone posted a mention of the MS article “A Guide to Building Enterprise Applications on the .NET Framework.”  This article is horrible.  It provides no value what so ever to developers.  I, as a developer and someone that builds applications that have large numbers of users and millions of transactions each day, sees ZERO value in this article.  It tells me nothing of value.  It has no code within it.  It is nothing more than marketing drivel.  This article is not a guide to building enterprise applications but a sales pitch on using their technologies.  There is no code.  No specific situations addressed.  No performance implications of doing anything.  Basically, there is nothing that provides value to me as a developer.  Halfway through the article, I felt like the child that had been given a lump of coal for Christmas as a joke.

This is the reason that I am not going to the PDC.  Why should I pay $1,500 for the right to walk into the PDC, pay for a cross-country plane ticket, hotel, all the other stuff that goes along with going to a conference, be out for a week, take time away from my clients, and not provide value to my customers to go to this conference.  This doesn't cost $1,500, it costs more like $8,000 (commonly referred to as driveout price).  I am tired of going to these conferences and not seeing code.  Of the last four conferences that I have been to, three were of minimal value.  I went to TechEd 2001.  There were two sessions that I attended that I thought were pretty good.  Everything else was babble and bored me.  I have been to some private conferences, that were nothing but marketing babble also.  The private conference that I went to in July of 2001 was awesome.  It was the only one.  Before you think or say, but by learning these technologies before others, you provide value to your customers, I would like to state that it is hard for a developer to learn these technologies without having code samples, with best practices information, copies of Yukon, Longhorn, and Whidbey to take home (which will happen according to what I have heard), and good solid believable and repeatable numbers to back these statements up with.

Before you say, but MS is going to be showing .NET 2.0, ASP.NET 2.0, Yukon, and Longhorn at the PDC, I know that, but I still don't want to pay money to listen to a sales pitch.

The bottom line on this rant is that if someone wants to market to the developer community, they need to provide code samples, solid architectual information, prerelease code as available, and other items of value to myself as a developer.  Quit trying to repackage marketing information for management types and say that it is for developers when it isn't.  I feel that I get better information on weblogs.asp.net, AspAdvice.com, Developmentor lists, private newsgroups, and Asp.NET Forums than I do by going to conferences.

Wally

PS.  I am not comparing TechEd to PDC.  I am comparing PDC to the private conferences that I went to.

4 Comments

  • about teched, I got to agree, in israel MS has some way to go until it could produce a valuable show. but I strongly disagree with you about the PDC. I paid with my own money and it costs me about 3000$ to get there from israel just to hear don box talking about indigo. from previous shows that don gave - it is pure gold.

    I think you are wrong about the pdc just take a look at the presenters - these are the guys that talk code and actually do the real work.

  • I've been thinking about this recently too...the big draw for PDC seems to be 'to see the cool technologies before release'...it is really hard for me to present my employers with a business case as to why they should spend around £5000 for me to go to LA to find out about technologies which offer no commercial benefit for the forseeable future (Longhorn is at least 2 years away...).

    The Betas of these products are time enough for businesses to spend money with the promise of future benefit. Yukon and Whidbey are very cool platforms but what would finding out about these a few months before everyone else offer my employers? Clients won't use them until the release (generally 8-10 months after the first public Beta)...the rest of the PDC talks also offer nothing new over that which I already use day to day...I'd love to see Don Box et al presenting...but I just 1. Can't justify paying for this myself and 2. Can't come up with a decent business case for my employers to pay for it...I wish I could, I personally would love to go!

  • I agree with you. Conferences are not about training. If I want to learn how to code against something, I will do that from a book or through a training course. TechEd helps me find out what I don't know and need to learn more about. The biggest mistake people make at TechEd is attending sessions on topics they've already mastered. I've never understood that pattern.



    This is my first PDC, so I'm not sure what to expect yet. Discovering what I don't know is important to me. It shapes the time I'll spend in studying and learning over the next months, or in the case of the PDC, years.

  • Rob,



    Articles need to at least be titled correctly and put into the appropiate spot. The article mentioned is not a guide to building enterprise apps with .NET. The article is an overview of technologies within .NET. The article gives me no examples or supporting documentation on why to do something or the best way to do it. It is nothing more than repackaged marketing info for managment.



    At the very least, the title of the article should be changed. The title is extremely misleading. It is not a Guide to Building Enterprise Applications at all.



    Wally

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