Once again, the VB group was huge this week. I don't know what we're doing to keep participation as high as it is, but I hope it's all me! Ok, it's most likely nothing to do with me. Still, it's been one of the most consistent groups in town. We had a lot of regulars show up, a few new faces, and 2 interesting presentations. Well, maybe I only think they were both interesting because I gave one of them.
I gave my now trademark talk about Windows Mobility and the Compact Framework. I don't know how the group really felt about it, most of the questions were about limitations of the devices themselves rather than the Compact Framework. I brought in a SmartPhone from a developer kit I managed to acquire (thanks Doug!) and passed it around the room so people could get a feel for the thing. Once again, I had no demonstrations. But that's because I keep presenting the same material over and over again. I swear that I'm switching topics for my next presentation to this group (in 2 weeks).
After I was finished putting people to sleep, Jim Wooley gave us a great introduction to code generation. Anyone who has generated a strongly typed dataset from an XSD file has done code generation. In fact, anyone who uses a Windows form has used code generation. But those times, the tools did it for us with minimal intervention. What happens when we want to be able to generate larger portions of code. Surely something simple, like creating a data access object which represents a table with hundreds of properties can be automated via code generation? Sure it can, and in a variety of ways. Jim spent an hour conveying the code generation gospel according to Kathleen Dollard. Well, actually just chapter 1 of the gospel. Wicked cool about how much work you can save using known tools like CodeDom or XSLT. Then we got a look at CodeSmith - a tool which not only makes it easier to understand and use code generation - it's a tool which comes with the CSLA Framework from Rocky Lhotka built in! Now that's making things easy!
After the presentations we decided that noone hated hearing me talk so much that they didn't want me to do the next presentation, so I'm going to talk about Team Services. Another canned presentation, no demos. This is too easy. After that I'll be doing a presentation of all demos, but on the tools from SysInternals so I don't know what code to write yet. Something that mucks up the file system and registry, probably.
After all official Study Group business had been concluded, several of us went out for beers and boneless chicken wings at the near by Chili's. We talked about music and music technology (check out the most expensive speakers I've ever heard of - the $350,000 SH-833 from www.tmhaudio.com), MP3 players, noise cancellation, software factories, and corporate responsibilities in the face of the evaporating white collar job market.
Oh, and Brendon couldn't come because it was his mother's birthday. Happy Birthday, Brendon's Mom!
-- Matt Ranlett