Rob Hope

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