Monthly Archives: August 2004

Visualizing “streamed” data

Just Rambling

I was just thinking about the first time I really *got* streaming. I couldn’t get past the idea of something like a SQLDataReader being a container or a fileStream being a container. Finally one day it just clicked – it’s a pipe. I remember last spring and summer when I gave a Streaming in .NET talk a number of times, I was very reliant on using my hands to describe this to attendees.

But truly, if you ever have a hard time explaining it to someone who just doesn’t get it … and that’s really only because it is very different from what they may have experienced so far as a developer … use the pipe image. Describe the stream as the pipe that the data is flowing through. Worked for me.

Burlingtonians: Don’t Forget MSDN EVent in town on Tuesday 8/10!!

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MSDN Events – Free Events for Developers 

To Register, click here or call 1.877.MSEVENT toll free

August and September MSDN Events: .NET Development and ASP .NET

Registration: 12:30 – 1:00 pm
Event Time: 1:00-5:00 pm

Join us for a demo-packed afternoon and gain valuable insight into .NET development. Plus, get a sneak peek at what’s coming in ASP .NET 2.0.

Session #1: Building ASP .NET Custom Controls
Learn how to author server-side ASP .NET custom controls to easily create reusable user interface elements for your Web applications. See how to gain granular control over caching, use control designers, render your controls, and handle postback events.

Session #2: ASP .NET 2.0 Overview
Discover the significant advances that ASP .NET 2.0 will offer to Web application developers to dramatically reduce the number of lines of code required for common tasks. Explore new features such as Personalization, Master Pages, Navigation Controls, and Web Part customization, as well as productivity enhancements in Visual Studio 2005.

Session #3: Developing Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 Solutions with Visual Studio .NET 2003
Experience the flexibility of XML data-sharing with Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003. Learn how its new Service Pack 1 feature enhancements will help developers and users get more out of InfoPath, and how the InfoPath Toolkit for Visual Studio .NET will allow developers to easily create, debug and build InfoPath solutions using managed code.

What kind of developer am I?

Just Rambling

I have called myself, very specifically, a “.NET developer” for a few years and not a “VB developer”. Why? Because I  program to the CLR using the VB language. I think that I may use one or two things from the Visual Basic namespace. Heck, I even use the ol’ Int32 and System.Environment.NewLine just so that I know I can translate my code or skills to C# if and when the need arises.

WHat happens after Microsoft takes away the word (or whatever you call this moniker) “.NET” from our tools? What do I call myself then? I’ve already gone from being a “.NET MVP” to a “VB MVP” since they shifted the buckets for MVPs and that’s the best one for me of the options. They all seem too separate. If I was an ASP.NET MVP then does that ignore all of my work doing WindowsForms? As a VB MVP, you wouldn’t know that I actually program in .NET …since this also incorporates VB6 developers who may not have made the shift.

I like being a “.NET developer”. It speaks to the *many* areas of .NET that I work in.

VB is *not* a dying language

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I have heard the prediction of the demise of VB from the mouths of some *very* believable sources (not at Microsoft).  These are people who are so immured in the internals of .NET that from their perspective it just may not make sense to have multiple languages. However from a practical perspective (i.e. the fact that there are just millions of developers using VB) it just makes no sense to *let* VB go away. There has been some loud vocalization of this in some recent Microsoft employee weblogs.

For example, here (Sean Gephardt) and here (Somasegar)  Somasegar is a Corporate VP of the developer division….I’ll believe him! And you gotta love this quote “When I’m with VB developers, I hear things like “all the samples are in C#”, and when I’m with C# developers, I hear “VB At the Movies, the VB Power Pack – what about us?” I guess we must be doing something right.”)

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

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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.