Day 4 at VSLive Dallas - Final Day

Last Day

Well today I thought I would wake up and make sure I eat breakfast on my company dime. As I was eating breakfast, in walked in a speaker who was a Microsoft Evangelist, Josh Holmes. We struck up a conversation lasted about an hour. It caused me to miss my the first session of the day. It was not a keynote today. We talked about IronRuby and Silverlight which he did a session on yesterday that I did not go to. He made me more curious in Silverlight 2. In the Silverlight 2 SDK there are these sample that contain themes. You can design a web form and apply these themes and get a half way get looking site. I will do this over the weekend. Good tip.

First Session - Visual Studio Reporting Technology and SQL Server 2008

I was busy trying to catch up on updating the blog so I was barely paying attention. But basically nothing has really changed in reporting services. My notes were blank.

Second Session - Panel Discussion, Bill Vaughn, Ken Getz, and Scott Belware

The three oldest guys in the conference in a panel. This was a treat. Bill Vaughn holds none of his words and Scott is an activist and Ken is a apologist.

Out of the questions and the discussion I picked up that:

Bill loves VB
Scott loves OOP
Ken does not want to put alot of the blame on Microsoft for all the problems in the industry.

Also everyone feels that the Entity Framework is not as nearly as good as it can be. But everyone agrees it's a good start.

End of Session.

Lunch was great. Cafeteria style!

Next Session - Sync Services for ADO.NET

Sync Services I think is very useful. We have a in-house made CRM app that is a good candidate for this because it is an Online/Offline app like Outlook. It stores CRM data in a local Access database when Offline and when Online it syncs-up with a remote SQL Service database on the network. The terrible thing about this CRM app is that you have to VPN into the network in order the sync the data. It's crazy. I did not design it. The one problem I was hoping this could solve was high transaction concurrancy, making it easier to sync data conflicts. But it does not I was told by the speaker. Too bad. NEXT!!!.

Next Session - Custom Client-Side Extenders with ASP.NET AJAX and VS 2008

Basically he picked off where he left off. He is a good speaker but I felt cheated he basically show us the AJAX Toolkit samples and told us to examine the code to learn how to create custom extenders. He must have been ready to leave. NEXT!!!

Those controls are very useful. I will use.

Last Session of VSLive - Leveraging the CLR in SQL Server 2008

What was Microsoft think when they created this functionality? I really doubt if anyone is using this stuff. Bill wrote a whole 150 page chapter in his book trying to figure out a use for this crap and all he could find is a currency converter. If anyone reading this that has ever even seen CLR code used in SQL Server, please let me know. There is no reason to use the crap. There is little or no performance gain. No need to use. Forget about it.

Conference Conclusion

All in All I would go again. This is a good conference because you get an independent view of Microsoft technologies and tools.

I will try and go to this at least once every two years.

The End

Until Next Time...