To anyone who has never attended a presentation by Rocky you may find that post title very strange. Everyone else is probably shaking their heads in agreement. It really felt like this. I could feel the vibe and that people were on the verge of jumping up and shouting out “hallelujah“ at different times.
Rocky Lhotka presented to a packed house of 40 (that’s a LOT in our small city) enchanted developers at Vermont.NET last night. We even had some non-locals with one person travelling down from Montreal and another coming from Norwalk, CT (which I believe is 300 miles away)! Rocky came to VTdotNET as an INETA speaker so we are very grateful to have had this opportunity.
Rocky explained the good and bad and the history of distributed computing with a focus on data-centric programming vs. object oriented programming. Many people think they are doing OOP but in reality are still doing Data-Centric. Big clue here – are you passing datasets and datatables around?
We also got a lot of insight into some of the bigger picture ideas and where distributed architecture is going with Indigo (and where remoting fits in and some issues with messages coming out of microsoft). He mentioned Rich Turner and I just kept hearing “no, nein, niente, shake head vigoursly“ rapping through my head.
We got a look at the basic concept of Rocky’s CSLA architecture and I have already been getting emails this morning from people saying “wow – it makes so much sense – I just ordered his book” We did raffle off a few copies at the meeting last night as well.
In the Q&A afterward I suppose it couldn’t be helped that Rocky got steered into a VB/C# discussion, but finally someone pulled us back to distributed programming.
Outside of the meeting, I should mention the wonderful leaf peeping tour we took. I picked Rocky up at the airport at noon and took him to an icon of Burlington – Al’s French Fries and then we hit the road. We took a 4 hour drive heading south from Burlington going over both the Middlebury Gap and Appalachian gaps. It made me sad to realize taht I had done this on my bike the year before I moved to Vermont and right now that is just not even physically possible. Anyway – though it was an overcast day – the leaves were just glowing and glorious on this entire drive. Rocky hit the absolute peak for this area of Vermont. After the meeting, a bunch of us headed to the Ben & Jerry’s scoop shop in downtown Burlington (see we do have a different type of user group!) Thanks also to Gardener’s Supply for not only hosting our meeting, but providing a gift certificate for us to present to Rocky in thanks.
