The winter MSDN event was a great success. Thanks to Glen and Michael for putting on such a great show. It was funny how this event started out. First I emailed Glen to get a head count so I would know how many flyers to print out about the local user group community. He told me 400 people were registered, which I thought was a large number. The next day Michael calls me on up and said “You should try to get here early if you can, if everyone shows up there won’t be enough seats”. So I left a couple minutes early and had no trouble getting in, actually I don’t think they would really turn people away unless it became really crowded, but I appreciate Michael looking out for me.
The presentations were excellent; it is amazing how much information you can learn from such an event, unless you are Keith and you know everything already, just kidding ;). The first presentation was about DataBinding. Actually have you ever wanted to write your own MediaPlayer and be able to change the look of your application? Well if you do you should have been at this presentation. Glen showed how to add some life to your products with new looks and the drag and drop functionality.
Next up was our local friend Michael Earls. It appears, or as the story goes, Glen changed some of the content on Michael so it was an exciting beginning. Luckily Michael can think on his feet quick and made it seem like it was part of the presentation. Good job on the presentation Michael. We learned some cool tips and tricks on debugging like how to break into a running ASP.NET application and how to use trace. I think trace is a great tool for everyone to use and if you don’t already know how to use check out the MSDN event content DVD. Keith who I was sitting next to said the funniest thing joking around while we were there, he said, “Trace is for the weak, real men use Response.Write for debugging”. This was a joke that Michael brought up in his presentation about the old way of doing trace in ASP applications.
The last presentation was a great intro and overview of what is soon to come with VS 2005. People are still waiting to see what the final release will have in it, but he did show the modeling tools and how to generate code from an architect’s point of view. It seems to me that .Net is really going to take off with VS2005 because they have so many features that help in the entire development cycle. This is really going to be a good area to watch for in the coming year for how to articles and what is good practice.
On that note look for Me and Matt to put out some posts on VS2005 over the next year we might start looking deeper into it and the new features that will help in your daily work. Also Microsoft has released “Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) for Agile Software Development, Beta” so check it out and let us know what you think about it and VS2005 in general.
P.S. – I will be working on getting the pictures and Photo Story to Glen who will post it for us somewhere because we don’t have the bandwidth for it. If you have suggestions for a back ground song let me know. An interesting guy I met at the MSDN event was Boris. He wrote a tool called Regmagik. Let me know if anyone else is using this. http://www.regmagik.com
--Brendon Schwartz