Day 3 at VSLive Dallas
Sorry for the late posts. My bad.
The keynote was great! Some guy (Roger Sessions) who was the CEO of objectwatch.com and very technically decorated. He said he was the first Microsoft MVP in Architecture, he wrote 7 books, is an IASA Fellow, etc, etc. The title of the keynote was "Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises". He I think basically went through a methodology he developed called SIP, which I can't think what it stands for but basically it walks you through a process of partitioning a large application into smaller applications to decrease complexity, which is what SOA intends to do. I enjoyed it because he used a quite bit of mathematics in his presentation which was interesting to me, a math major. He referenced one of my favorite book, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering. You should see it on the right in my book list. His topic was great but a very basic concept if you have experience. In his slides, he partitioned a table of items by item category which I thought was obvious just by looking at the table. The concept and process he presnted was omething I thought is learned through experience. 99% of projects are partitioned by functionality which is to me the same as category, this appears to be nothing new.
The speaker went over a few new things in VS 2008 like the:
CSS info pane
Javascript Intellisense
ListView control
DataPager control
The CSS stuff to me has not been helpful, but I had problems understanding how to use the CSS panes. The same thing is use in Expressions Web. Now you don't need a designer app like Expressions Web. You can do it all in VS now.
Javascript Intellisense & Debugging is cool but I already knew about it.
The ListView control to me is basically the same as the GridView control. So nothing gained. The DataPager control was cool because you canpage through any data collection.
You can call a web service through Javscript
The DataPager control has AJAX support
The AJAX control toolkit has extender controls you can use with other controls.
I will definitely use them on my next project.
Basically in VS 2008, its alot easier to build custom workflows. It comes with a project template and you can develop, run and test if SharePoint is installed on the same machine. (Which is not good in production). If not, it is still a pain to test because you have to still create the necessary files to install a feature on the server and then activate it. And God help you if there are bugs because you have to keep on running the install.bat file.
I will play with this more. I think workflows are not used as nearly as much as I think they should be.
By far the most crowded session of the conference, it looked like it was a keynote session. The Entity Framework was developed due to an old class design issue. In the old days of OOP, you basically would design your database based on your class structure. So every class maps directly to a table in the database. This works but if you already have a database in place and want to create classes model to model it, how would you do it?
You have to invest in an ORM. Object Relational Mapping.
The Entity Framework is one way to do it. Microsoft felt it needed to get into the ORM space and the Entity Framework is MS ORM.
ADO.NET Data Services exposes entities over the web (web services). ADO.NET Data Services (Code name : Astoria) is really cool!
This was a very introductory session to ASP.NET AJAX which showed you how to used the updatepanel control. The speaker was funny and really informative. One tip I got was to use a script manager proxy for usercontrol development. You might say, "I would have thought you would have already know that.". Well I did not, thank you!
Also as of SP1, there is a history extender object.
Also the speaker said if you are a web developer you must get Firebug for Firefox
All I can say that this was a great session. Bill Vaughn is a really really good speaker. He like everyone else, he loved the new Table Value Parameters. Also he talked about the new Object Dependency Tracking. This is really cool! Let's say you you have a function and a million stored procedures. You can find in what stored procedures where the function is being used easily.
Things to note:
Bill Vaughn Blog: www.hitchhikers.net - Check it out!
Bill Vaughn said "It's better to sort on the client or server in code than to use an ORDER BY in the stored procedure." You would not know how many times I have seen people use order by in a stored proc.
Look at ADO.NET Sync Services - Handles syncronization - Think of ActiveSync. Online/Offine syncronization.
Until next time...
Keynote
The keynote was great! Some guy (Roger Sessions) who was the CEO of objectwatch.com and very technically decorated. He said he was the first Microsoft MVP in Architecture, he wrote 7 books, is an IASA Fellow, etc, etc. The title of the keynote was "Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises". He I think basically went through a methodology he developed called SIP, which I can't think what it stands for but basically it walks you through a process of partitioning a large application into smaller applications to decrease complexity, which is what SOA intends to do. I enjoyed it because he used a quite bit of mathematics in his presentation which was interesting to me, a math major. He referenced one of my favorite book, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering. You should see it on the right in my book list. His topic was great but a very basic concept if you have experience. In his slides, he partitioned a table of items by item category which I thought was obvious just by looking at the table. The concept and process he presnted was omething I thought is learned through experience. 99% of projects are partitioned by functionality which is to me the same as category, this appears to be nothing new.
First Session - What's new in VS 2008 for ASP.NET Developers
The speaker went over a few new things in VS 2008 like the:
CSS info pane
Javascript Intellisense
ListView control
DataPager control
The CSS stuff to me has not been helpful, but I had problems understanding how to use the CSS panes. The same thing is use in Expressions Web. Now you don't need a designer app like Expressions Web. You can do it all in VS now.
Javascript Intellisense & Debugging is cool but I already knew about it.
The ListView control to me is basically the same as the GridView control. So nothing gained. The DataPager control was cool because you canpage through any data collection.
Things I learned
You can call a web service through Javscript
The DataPager control has AJAX support
The AJAX control toolkit has extender controls you can use with other controls.
I will definitely use them on my next project.
Next Session - Building Workflows with SharePoint
Basically in VS 2008, its alot easier to build custom workflows. It comes with a project template and you can develop, run and test if SharePoint is installed on the same machine. (Which is not good in production). If not, it is still a pain to test because you have to still create the necessary files to install a feature on the server and then activate it. And God help you if there are bugs because you have to keep on running the install.bat file.
I will play with this more. I think workflows are not used as nearly as much as I think they should be.
Next Session - Building Effective Models with the Entity Framework
By far the most crowded session of the conference, it looked like it was a keynote session. The Entity Framework was developed due to an old class design issue. In the old days of OOP, you basically would design your database based on your class structure. So every class maps directly to a table in the database. This works but if you already have a database in place and want to create classes model to model it, how would you do it?
You have to invest in an ORM. Object Relational Mapping.
The Entity Framework is one way to do it. Microsoft felt it needed to get into the ORM space and the Entity Framework is MS ORM.
Additional Note:
ADO.NET Data Services exposes entities over the web (web services). ADO.NET Data Services (Code name : Astoria) is really cool!
Next Session - ASP.NET AJAX in Visual Studio 2008
This was a very introductory session to ASP.NET AJAX which showed you how to used the updatepanel control. The speaker was funny and really informative. One tip I got was to use a script manager proxy for usercontrol development. You might say, "I would have thought you would have already know that.". Well I did not, thank you!
Also as of SP1, there is a history extender object.
Also the speaker said if you are a web developer you must get Firebug for Firefox
Next Session - SQL Server 2008 Enhancements
All I can say that this was a great session. Bill Vaughn is a really really good speaker. He like everyone else, he loved the new Table Value Parameters. Also he talked about the new Object Dependency Tracking. This is really cool! Let's say you you have a function and a million stored procedures. You can find in what stored procedures where the function is being used easily.
Things to note:
Bill Vaughn Blog: www.hitchhikers.net - Check it out!
Bill Vaughn said "It's better to sort on the client or server in code than to use an ORDER BY in the stored procedure." You would not know how many times I have seen people use order by in a stored proc.
Look at ADO.NET Sync Services - Handles syncronization - Think of ActiveSync. Online/Offine syncronization.
Until next time...
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