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Code Camp Recap
So I think the CodeCamp presentations went well. I had my Reflection one on Saturday, which went good, but it ran a little bit short because I was nervous and talked too fast. I also decided at the end of that the reason why it felt awkward to me was that it was constructed more like a sales pitch for my way of doing things rather than a demonstration of the technology. I’ve decided I’m going to rip it up and redo it at some point. Certainly at the end of the presentation my argument that being able to leverage Reflection made things easier didn’t feel right. I think the presentation can be improved dramatically.
On the flip side, I felt that the MSMQ presentation on Sunday went a lot better. The demo was much more straightforward, I finished the presentation essentially on time, and had 3 or 4 people stay after to ask me questions…and I got some applause too. I think the primary difference again was structure.
Overall I got great positive feedback on my first speaking engagements.
I also gave Peter Kellner a hand with an issue he was having with a Server Control of his. Peter organized Code Camp and did an outstanding job. I was surprised when he asked me for my opinion (maybe I shouldn’t have been, but I’m generally a humble guy…until you get to know me anyway), but I think I gave him a couple of good options for his problem. That’s all I can really say because it was something he was doing that’s proprietary, but it felt good to have someone think my opinion mattered!
I spent some time talking to Nima Dilmaghani, my Developer Envangelist, about what I need to do to become a Microsoft MVP. He said that I need to blog more, which I’ve been trying to do, so I am going to start putting up short versions of my presentations as I prepare them. I also volunteered to go present at the Santa Barbara .NET User Group if they need presenters, and I am considering volunteering for others as well. We’ll see how it goes.
I’ll have some entries up here shortly about the sessions I saw at CodeCamp, with versions of my presentations to follow.
Talk to you soon,
Rob
Second Session At Code Camp
Hi all,
I’ve signed up to do a second session at the Silicon Valley Code Camp October 7th and 8th. In addition to my talk on Reflection, I’ll also be giving a talk on Microsoft Message Queueing and how it can be used to offload work on your application and do that work asynchronously. It’s a lot of work getting these talks together but I’m hoping this turns out to be fun!
Here’s a link to my sessions:
http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com/Sessions.aspx?id=c97ff760-0c11-48eb-bd41-493aab31f233
Talk to you later!
Rob
SoCal Tech Summit
Hi all,
Spent this last Saturday at the SoCal Tech Summit ( http://www.socaltechsummit.com ) seeing some presentations and visiting with friends. It was time well spent as I saw two excellent presentations, one on the object modeling in Visual Studio 2005, and the other on the new Atlas features. The third presentation wasn’t nearly as interesting, and that had to do with the speaker. I have to tell you, folks, if you’re going to give a presentation on a technology, at least have the courtesy to act like you support it or like it. There’s nothing worse than sitting through a powerpoint listening to how stupid some company is, how dumb their developers are, and how idiotic what the presenter is about to show you is, and how unlikely it is that you would use it because of the risks involved. Why bother?
In any event, if you haven’t added a class diagram yet through Visual Studio 2005, go do it today! Just right click on your project and select “Add Class Diagram” to see what I mean. It appears to be every bit as powerful as the Rational stuff from way back, but completely integrated. It even updates itself as your code changes, and can track what objects are derived from what for faster and more thorough model review. I came away very impressed as an architect, in that you can sit there and model out the entire system’s roles and responsibilities, and when you are done, save it and hand it off to a development team with the code shell already in place and ready to go. And if you change your code, including methods or properties or inheritance, the diagrams update themselves, leaving you with a consistent model for your software. I was extremely excited about it, although I was not quite in tears, as the presenter suggested I should be.
The Atlas presentation was nearly as interesting, although not quite as exciting. Having built a full Ajax support system myself for past web sites, I understand the theory behind Atlas as well as anyone, so that part of it was a simple review. But the ease with which the presenter was able to implement and interact with Web Services was nice. Certainly usable in place of building your own Ajax application. I hope it ends up better in the end than the full-on WebForm callback system that is in place for a lot of current applications. Personally I hate the overhead of doing a full page refresh for what is really a partial callback. My intent is largely going to be calling web services directly with it and staying away from the partial page refresh as much as I can.
Talk to you soon,
Rob
Be welcome and true.
Rob Hope 