Day 2 at VSLive Dallas!

Keynote:

The keynote for the day was done by Rob Howard, the CEO of Telligent(I like the name of the company). He first started off stating his background with Microsoft and how he started off as a developer and moved up to Program Mangager and then left to start Telligent. Then he basically went into his spill on Enterprise Infrastructure 2.0, which was basically a mix of marketing his company products and where he thought where the industry was going which is toward a more social networking, Web 2.0 and that it will be really brought to life when our little kids reach adulthood because they are growing up with things like Webkinz. My kids keep bugging me to get those stuff animals for them!

First Session

The Cloud Computing for .NET session I really wanted to go to was cancelled. So by default I went to a session that I think would help me at my current employer, "So Many Choices, So Little Time, Understanding Your .NET Data Options.

This was a good choice. The speaker briefly went through each of the data access options in .NET 3.5 SP1. As of SP1, you have about multiple choices.

LINQ to SQL
LINQ to ENTITIES
ADO.NET Web Services
Traditional ADO.NET

The speaker, Lenni Lobel did a good job I think. He also added alot of humor to keep you awake. Excellent speaker and session.

Rating: 5 stars

Second Session

For the second session it was a tossup between "Entity Framewoork 101" or "Introduction to ASP.NET Dynamic Data". Again I chose the one that would benefit my current employer, "Introduction to ASP.NET Dynamic Data". Man I wish I knew abou this a month ago. I had this project which basically was a GridView with CRUD operation so users change change their information on the web. Well with a Dynamic Data Web application project. You can create a page with a GridView with CRUD operations in 10 minutes max! It took me a week to get to the point that the speaker got to in 10 minutes! It was crazy! Check it out because my simple GridView project is a very common IT project in companies.

The speaker gave the impression that this might have been his first conference presentation. But he did alright and actually had someone from the audience do the demo.

Rating: 5 stars because of usefulness.

Lunch

Lunch was interesting. They had people sit together according to a topic they were interested in. It was called the Birds of a Feather Lunch. I sat at the SharePoint table and had an interesting conversation with a SharePoint consultant and one of the SharePoint speakers, David Walker whose session I went to after lunch. My discussion with the consultant was how to solve content editing and publishing issues in WSS. WSS does not have a decent content editor that is hosted in the browser.

After Lunch Session

After lunch I went to a session I thought would help me advance technically. "Practical Use of Model View Presenter and .NET". I'm very weak when it comes to design patterns so I thought I would try to learn something. I did learned about the Model View Presenter passive view pattern. It's a good pattern but to sum it up, if you take the traditional three tier architecture model and add an additional layer between the UI and business layer and name it the View, then you have the MVP pattern.

Rating: 3 stars for knowledge gained. Other than that. It was boring.

Next Session

This is the timeslot with the session of the speaker I spoke with at lunch, the first SharePoint session. I think David Walker did not do a good job of presenting what the title of the session inferred you were going to learn "Best and Worst Practices - SharePoint as an Application Development Architecture". He mention maybe 3 best practices in his whole session and 2 of them were SharePoint 101 practices. A waste of time.

Rating: 1 star

Last Session

A bad mix of sessions for this timeslot but because I wanted to tell my company I went to everything then I chose a session to attend, "Using Windows Workflow Foundation to Build an Order Processing System". Robert Green, the speaker, did a good job I thought. It got me very interested in doing Workflows with WWF (the old WWE, bad humor). The only thing is that he assume to much previous WWF knowledge for me.

Rating: 4 stars

VSLive After Dark - The furure of .NET

I was hungary by now so I went and got something to eat and miss the beginning of this but caught most of it. It was a panel of independent consultants that answered questions from the moderator. One question was worthy of noting "What are the Pros and Cons of .NET". One speaker hit the nail on the head. It keeps changing every 6 months! Once you get familiar with one thing, something new comes one and they tell you to forget everything you just learned like with conventional ADO.NET. Now LINQ is out and that is the new sliced bread so learn and use it.

That was it.

What I learned:

LINQ to SQL - Ultimately gets converted to conventional ADO.NET, Produces dynamic SQL and only benefit is to decrease lines of code.

Web Services - Only use web services externally - Internet
WCF - Only use internally - Intranet

Refresher of MVP pattern

Get the book - Domain Driven Design by Eric Allen

Tomorrow should be better

Until next time...