Way to go Colt! Read his post here.
There seems to be a link missing so here it is:
http://www.mshk.com/hk/msdn/docs/MSDNVideo
Colt is very instrumental in the .NET community in Hong Kong, a busy INETA Volunteer, MVP and ASPInsider. (and weblogs.asp.net blogger…)
John Bristowe explains (from personal experience) what it takes to really learn and understand all that goes on through the pipe in .NET – WSE, Web Services, etc etc. I have always been impressed with John’s scope of knowledge on this topic and having only scratched the surface of some of that stuff myself, have always wondered how he does it. He claims it’s lots of hard works. That I agree with, however, I think his brain has something to do with it, too!
Sounds like TechEd, but it’s not! It’s DevTeach, Montreal, Quebec in June. I am a huge fan of this conference for a number of reasons. 1) It’s less than 2 hours from my house 2) it’s very inexpensive 3) the canadian exchange makes it even LESS expensive 4) awesome speakers 5) gobs of great .NET content (and SQL and FoxPro) 6) FUN event – not too huge so it’s very rub your elbows -y.
With Early Bird special before March 31, registration ends up being only $570 US for the 3 days. If you live in the northeast, you should definitely check this out.
Thanks to Brad Abrams and John Hawkins at Microsoft for shipping me gobs of the WinFX posters to give to attendees of my Whidbey Base Classes presentation (next week!) and share with some other user groups.
They had a few left over from PDC.
Jack Herrington, who, if you google his name comes up over and over as “the force behind code generation” (and author of this well received book on Code Generation) gave Kathleen’s new book Code Generation in Microsoft .NET (MSPress) a 5 star review! Way to go Kathleen. Another review by someone who seems to know what they are talking about is also 5 stars. Too bad some meany who for some reason missed the fact that all code is in VB AND C# and didn’t like the binding of the book posted his one star nasty review TWICE making Kathleens’ current average of two 5’s and two 1’s not good. Whether you are interested in codeGen or interested in getting a better understanding of how .NET works, definitely check out this book!
Found this little C# app on iDesign’s download page to demonstrate perf gains with generics. (scroll down on page and look for Generics Performance.) These are demos from iDesign’s classes. I believe it’s the same demo that is in Juval Lowy’s C# Generics MSDN article.
From the iDesign downloads page:
When using value types in a generic type there is typically a 200 percent performance gain, and with reference types you can expect up to a 100 percent performance gain. This demo is a micro-benchmark application, which executes a stack in a tight loop. The application lets you experiment with value and reference types on an Object-based stack and a generic stack, as well as changing the number of loop iterations to see the effect generics have on performance.
I am finding it painful to try to help people understand generics in such a small amount of time. I have to keep reminding myself – it’s an introduction, an overview, a look, a hit list, a reference. But it is SO satisfying to help someone get to that “oh!” of real understanding and uncomfortable to knowingly leave them hanging.
(thanks Leon, I fixed the spelling in my title – glad someone’s actually reading it!)
Just this morning I was visiting the MSDN Architecture Dev Center with the idea that if Duncan Mackenzie’s info is on the VB area, etc. then I could find out who the person in charge of the Architecture area was. But that site was very different and completely impersonal.
This afternoon, into my aggregator pops this from Keith Pleas announcing the revamped Architecture and voila! it is TOTALLY different than what I saw this morning and now exactly what I had expected to see!
So with all of the great architecture posts and discussion out there, here is a fine place to follow up!
okay from Kent Sharkey, via Chris Garty from the proverbial horse’s mouth (sorry Scott! you’re not a horse…)
Chris asked Scott some straightforward questions and got some straightforward answers.
The summary:
(copy paste sure helps prevent “telephone operator” here…)
If you can’t wait till June and you live in the u.s. , get thee to a DevDays show! (where alphas will be distributed)
I’m working on the generics part of my little BCL Whidbey talk. I’m going to have about 5 minutes to do generics – whadya think? LOL.
I just wanted to point out that in addition to some of the more (now) classic resources, like Jason Clark’s MSDN Mag articles (1, 2) and Anders Hejlsberg’s PDC demo, Juval Lowy’s C# MSDN article, the generics chapter from the upcoming VB Whidbey book by Scott Swigart, Sean Campbell and a few others, that I found Rob Chartier’s article on 15 Seconds very helpful. Since I spend 97% of my coding time in VB, I have to work a wee bit harder when dealing with the C# stuff and also C# before and after generics is very different than VB before and after Generics. It was not such a big leap from VB into generics. Anyway, thanks Rob.
I also had a funny idea. Since I am always adding grins in the form of (hmmm, will this mess up my html?)