Jim Wooley and I showed the group a little higher level material this time.  Jim showed off Generics, using the WhiteHorse class designer and separate code implementations contrasting inheritance, interfaces, and generics.  Using simple examples he showed us how generics preserve Intellisense and provide faster runtimes over 100,000 iterations.  Despite being a contrived example, we saw clear differences in performance over significant numbers of element access.

I showed off the Observer pattern using the example provided by the Head First Design Patterns book (this went on the white board) and an article from OnDotNet where a reproduction of a binary clock sorta demonstrates the concepts of an observer pattern.  The thing I learned most from my own presentation is that I need to spend more time reading that Head First Design Patterns book.  I felt like I understood what I read, but I had a hard time explaining it in a way that made sense to everyone else.  Actually, I had a hard time explaining the example they used in the book to illustrate the bad way to do things.  Everyone got the correct “pattern” method right away.

— Matt Ranlett

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