Day of .NET
The Chicago .NET Users Group put together A Day of .NET Conference that took place over the weekend. It seems to be similar to the Code Camps that I keep hearing about. Overall, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the event and the turnout was better than I expected. (I jokingly asked Brian Scott on the way in to the building “How many people you think will be here?”, “6. At most.") The turnout looked to be at least 150 people. (I’m a pretty bad judge of group sizes, but it had to be at least 150)
The tracks for the event seemed to be based around similar topics: Team System and Visual Studio 2005, Office Integration, General Code Talks, and Server Side Development. My day started with a great talk on Code Generation by Keenan Newton. He went over the pro’s and con’s of code generation and dug into the CodeDom a bit. Next I went over to see a talk by Chris “Developer-evangelist-without-a-blog” Mayo on ClickOnce. Chris has a reputation for being a great presenter and he backed that reputation up with another great one. His presentation definitely covered a lot of the questions I had lurking about ClickOnce. (I’m hoping to get the slides so I can pitch it at the office.) After Chris’s presentation I took a little break for lunch and chit chatted with Brian about various things (including his work, CoolSavings). After the free sack lunch (Turkey. Yum.), I ventured over to Keith Franklin’s talk on TDD with Visual Studio.NET 2005. Apparently, Keith forgot to pray to the demo gods. His VS.NET blew up quite spectacularly during his talk. He was able to overcome that minor set-back and plow forward though.
After seeing his talk however, I’m a little disappointed in the TDD tooling that is included with VS.NET 2005. I’ve become quite accustomed to TestDriven.NET and the frictionless Code->Test->Refactor workflow it has given me. As I’m writing a test, I just right-click, Run Test and Bam! I know if it works. In VS.NET 2005 however, it seems like there are a lot of hoops you have to jump through just to run a single test. First pull up all of tests in your project. Then find the test that you want to run. Check it off. Click the run tests button. Wait for your tests to run. Then double-click your test in the test window to view the results. Seems like a lot of work.
After Keith’s talk, I hung around to see Dave Bost’s talk on the Visual Studio Designers. After watching his presentation, it became pretty obvious to me that I will probably not be using the Team System Architect designers. Way to complicated for the type of work I do. Very neat, but my apps aren’t distributed “enough” to make the designers appealing.
For the last talk of the day I saw Compact Framework 2.0 by Derek Ferguson. Overall it was a good presentation. A little light on the code, and heavy on the concepts which is okay, but I was expecting to see a kick butt app.
All in all, I tip my cap to the CNUG guys for creating a really great one day conference. Especially since it was no cost to the attendees. I’m definitely going to be going again.