Jeffery Richter at the Atlanta Microsoft Professionals
Popping up just in the nick of time as I work on a project dealing with unmanaged code, Jeffery Richter gave us a great presentation on threading and reliability. Among the things I learned...IntPtr is bad. Time to go rewrite some code! Stupid examples....
We had about 60 people show up for Richter's presentation. He was a great speaker, very dynamic and engaging. I know a lot of people who couldn't make it and I'm sorry that they missed such a great show. Jeff has a way of taking an extremely complex topic and turning it into something you feel like you've known about for a long time. It has something to do with the way he explains things in plain language. Threading, marshalling across app domain boundries, limitless app domains in a single process... All of this stuff just makes sense when he talks about it. It's a shame that he's not here now that I'm looking at my own convoluted code to ask questions. Oh well. Richter's new book on the 2.0 CLR comes out at the end of this week and it looks like something I'm going to have to run out and get (and read!)
After the meeting we all headed over to the center of slow restaurant service, Buffalo Wild Wings. I don't understand why the service at this place is so bad. There are like 8 people working as wait staff at 9pm. When my party of approximately 25 people showed up, there were possibly 15 other people in the restaurant. It took them over 20 minutes to get me my order of sweet tea and somehow my table got left out of the wings distribution until the very end (nearly an hour after we got there). However, the company was good and the conversations were engaging so time flew by and I didn't get home until 11pm
We gave away a dozen tshirts, some random books and notebooks, a copy of ComponentOne's Enterprise Studio 2005, a pass to the MIX '06 conference in Vegas, and an MSDN Team Suite license courtesy of James Shaw. Thanks to everyone who came out and I hope everyone had a great time!
-- Matt Ranlett