I have had a day to recover (read 'Get some sleep') from the first CodeCampOz. I had a great time and was able to meet some great people. I can now put some faces to the names. I met Mitch Denny and Greg Low, Darren Neimke (who finally put two and two together to realise that Rory who is a developer from Canberra who works with Geoff happens to be the same Rory who is a developer from Canberra and went to CodeCampOz with Geoff that he met the day before - don't worry Darren there are a lot of us/me), Andrew Coates, Bill McCarthy, Joel Pobar, Bill Chesnut, Nick Randolph and Charles Sterling to name a few.
Rather than give a session by session outline of what happened on CodeCamp and who said what, I will just mention a couple of things that I didn't already know and that are more than just a little cool.
Greg Low outlined some of the new features in SQL 2005 such as the ability to use CLR assemblies in queries. I can see a lot of use for these for manipulating data when inserting or selecting data, but I have to say that I was hoping to be able to do a little more with this new ability to make DBA's plead and tremble. I wanted to see a bit more ability for CLR objects to be able to map easier to columns in a table (OO style), but it still seems to be down to TSQL at the end of the day.
Adam Cogan talked about new ASP.Net data binding and navigation controls. Some of the new environment features that are great are collapsible tag contents in HTML view, much better intellisense support and accessibility compliance checking of the HTML output (government department developers will love this). There is now support for synchronising files between the local machine and remote servers which is a great improvement over simply uploading files. There is much better data binding support, such as the ability for data binding to append to the existing contents of a control rather than wipe it out. Caching support will also be a very interesting thing to check out as it comes with SQL Server support for identifying changes to the data as the event to reset the cache.
Andrew Coates ran a session on ClickOnce which is very useful, although perhaps a little optimistic on the naming. I can see a lot of benefit for places where I work for ClickOnce internet deployment to be used for applications. I am not sold on the implementation mainly from a UI point of view, but he mentioned that it is fully programmable so that shouldn't be a problem. I have thought about internet deployment of applications and updates for a few years and have seen some very good implementations, but also some very poor ones. ClickOnce has a lot of advantages, mainly being that there is separation of developers from the deployment process which should be a network administration responsibility. It is also something that is very quick and easy to deal with.
Darren Neimke talked about ASP.Net Web Part controls. These will be very cool to use, especially for portal type web sites as they will allow the users to customise how they want to see the site. Unfortunately I don't think that any of my sites can benefit from this. He did say a couple of words that I couldn't be sure were intentional. Regardless, we have some new words for the dictionary. Automagic/Automagical and Motzilla (cheesy Mozilla???).
Joel Pobar ran the next session on CLR internals. I didn't get anything specific out of this session, but it was very interesting. I had a chat to him later in the afternoon which was great. He had previously helped me out in the AusDotNet users group. He was a very friendly and happy to help out developers in need.
Bill Chesnut talked about BizTalk which I really enjoyed. It is yet another technology that I see could (should) be used in my current workplace to completely revolutionise business communication and the business process. I found it quite fascinating how BizTalk works and fits together to support the flow of data in, through and out of a business. With a great amount of hindsight, I can see that this is something that my previous employer should have used (instead of me having to write warehouse interfaces). I would love to get some exposure to this, especially because I would love to work for Avanade (they seem to do a lot of BizTalk). I was able to talk to Bill after the session to shoot some questions at him about how BizTalk would fit into my current work environment - Thanks Bill, very helpful.
Dominic Cooney talked about performance in managed applications. The most important performance tip I got from Dominic is that if you don't declare enums with a specific type, they default to Integer. This is a waste of space if you are only using numbers between 0 and 255. This is because an Integer use 4 bytes and a Byte (being values between 0 and 255) only uses one byte. As most enum declarations (except lengthy Bitwise ones) only use values under 255, they should be declared as Byte to save memory.
Nick Randolph and Bill McCarthy gave a very length session on VB.Net. Lots of great stuff here although I was already familiar with some of it. The first feature that hit me most were mixed scope declarations of properties. This means, for example, you can declare the property Get method as Public and the Set as Protected. The next main feature that I loved was the code snippet abilities. I always want code formatted the way I want it, and code snippets will be perfect for doing things like creating property skeleton code just they way I want it. Better and easier support for creating project and class templates are really cool. Creating default class definitions with dynamic comments will be so easy with this. Oh, and can anyone say Refactoring or Edit and Continue.
On Sunday, I had lunch with Nick and Bill and we had a great chat about VB, its future and current Whidbey implementation. We also came up with some great ideas about the VB/C# debate. As the two languages are getting closer and closer together, they were commenting that it really doesn't matter if you develop in one or the other as the difference is basically just syntax. That being the case, I think it is a shame that a lot of companies are asking for C# instead of VB developers.
This conversation did make me think about some solutions to this situation. Given that C# and VB compile down to the same IL anyway, how cool would it be if VB and C# could be used interchangeably. Take a webform for example. You can switch between the designer view and the HTML/XML view. This is where I think VB and C# should go. For any piece of code displayed, there should be a switch for whether it is displayed in VB or C#. This means that within the one assembly, you could have one developer create a version in VB, and a C# developer could come along and make changes, in C#. These should even be settings in the users IDE setup as to whether code should be presented and editable in VB or C#. I think this will be my request for the next version of Visual Studio.
Greg Low gave a session about ADO.Net. This was really helpful to see some of the new features like multiple recordsets, XML data types etc etc. I had a good chat to Greg at the end of the camp about support for OPENXML and FOR XML EXPLICIT. As with all new versions, there is so much to read and learn.
I said that I didn't want to give a session by session account of the weekend, but it kind of happened anyway. Thanks to all the people who ran the weekend, spoke in the sessions and for all the people who went along.
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