Daily Archives: August 1, 2004

Dr. Neil on our Tablet DevLab and the official “class photo”

Tablet

I dunno – the picture seems to be named “Tablet Dudes” – hey! I’m even wearing PINK for goodness sake. Three of the folks in the pic are from the Tablet Team, the rest are us students.

I had never met Neil Roodyn (aka Dr. Neil) before the DevLab. A super nice (and oh my god smart) guy. Here’s his take on the devlab I attended last week.

By the way “Dr. Neil” is not just some marketing moniker – he holds a PhD!

I have seen a few blogs that list some of the people at the devlab. Here is the full list. I’m going around the room in my memory since everyone seemed to stay in the same seats the whole time.

Martin Shoemaker who wins the prize for coming up with the most awesome ideas for improving mobile hardware.Martin is an INETA speaker and also author of TabletUML.
Jeff Richter, John Robbins and Charles Petzold (they sat together the whole time – there was a little glow coming from that part of the room)
Carl Franklin (Carl, dude, you’re not in the photo)
Markus Eggers Markus has written a bunch of Tablet stuff already in his Code Magazine.
Larry O’Brien who always wore the coolest shirts. Larry has written a bunch of Tablet articles for DevX like this one.
Jon Box  already a .NetCF guru, now he’s going to be a true Mobile programming guru!
Billy Hollis  – poor Billy, lower case “L“s are the most difficult letters for the hand writing recognition to pick up when you aren’t using cursive hand writing
Me
Dr. Neil Roodyn
Paul Yao (author of the first official published book on Windows programming)
Carl Prothman (INETA speaker and user group leader of .NETDA in Redmond)

It was a thrill and an honor to be part of this group.

Uploaded my What’s New in Whidbey BCL powerpoint deck

dotNET

Over the winter, I had a great excuse to dive into the Whidbey BCL as I had a presentation to do for the Edge East Conference in Boston in February. I spent a huge amount of time going back and forth between the .NET 1.1 reference library comparing it to the reference library in the PDC bits. I did lots of experiments, watched Kit George’s PDC presentation so often that I’d no that voice *anywhere* :-). There was minimal information out there at the time. Practically the only thing anyone had written about was Generics (and those articles and book chapters were really helpful to me as well.)

I reworked the deck against the May bits of Whidbey for DevTeach in June – about a week before the Beta1 was released. I have uploaded that version of the deck. It is my attempt at a hit list of what’s new in the base classes. Many thanks to Kit George for clarifying things as well as making some great suggestions and feeding me some widely unknown tidbits every once in a while. Also thanks to Krzysztof Cwalina for some awesome posts on his weblog. Oh – and to Scott Cate and Scott Watermasysk for being my first guinea pigs on this talk over a live meeting in February.

Here it is…it’s 1.1 MB

As noted in a prior post, Ahmed AboutTaleb from the BCL Team just put up an official list of what’s new on the BCLTeam blog the other day.