.Net Jonesie - TechEd Day 2

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

The second day of TechEd was just as good as the first - but longer. I'm going to need a brain vacation by the end of Wednesday.

Sessions

One of my favorite speakers and all-round nice guy Adam Cogan presented 15 Rules for better code. Here's a great quote from Adam:

"Code never rusts"

Which means, don't re-write for the sake of it. I should print this in a large font and stick it to my desk! This was the best session so far for me. Adam is never afraid of expressing his opinion which is quite refreshing. Some of his ideas are unconventional but actually make a lot of sense - like including menu options so customers can execute unit tests in shipped applications.

I'm definitely going to get a copy of his Code Auditor. It's like FxCop in some ways but it runs on the source code and you can look for things like correct Font usage, button size, form styles etc. [Adam - next time you want to do a session in Christchurch you can do any subject you like].

Fellow NZ.Netter Chris Auld presented an interesting session on Office Solutions. I didn't realize there were so many ways of interacting with Office and Office data files. It's quite a mess really. Hopefully things will improve with VSTO 2005. It did give me an idea on how I could re-write an application using InfoPath and a custom Task Pane - but then I'd be breaking my new "Code never rusts" mantra.

Jay Roxe presented another great session on ClickOnce deployment. He did lots of demos of the basic stuff we have all(?) seen before but he also answered lots of great questions and talked about how to extend ClickOnce using the System.Deployment namespace and Mageui.exe. I do like ClickOnce and it provides some great features over NoTouch deployment, but I'm not exactly sure how to use it when delivering applications off-site. At work, we don't create shrink wrapped solutions - they need us to install and configure - but we do need to be able to deliver updates in a way that anyone can install them. I was hoping I could do this with ClickOnce but essentially I need ClickOnce to deliver a ClickOnce deployment. Jay asked my to email the details to him which I will do once I'm back at work.

Ulrich Roxburg did a good overview of the SOA designers in Team System Architect Edition, and showed some new stuff I hadn't seen before (and I'm not talking about the 4398 error messages!). There's a new tool, Narrator, that give you an interactive view of your model. I found a MSDN Download for this, I think.

To finish the sessions for the day, I attended Nic Wise's session on Mobilising Smart Client Apps. This was a great nuts and bolts session on using a low level API (the name of which has slipped my mind) to detect network status changes and other information. I can see myself using this in normally connected desktop apps.

The Party

Normally, the idea of party with hundreds of geeks would be a frightening prospect. But throw in copious quantities of alcoholic beverages, loud music and degenerate comedians and you get a great event. This year TechFest was at the St. James theatre. I hadn't been there before and it was certainly an interesting venue, if a little cramped at times. Ewen Gilmore gave 3 routines that had me in stitches at times - he's certainly not for those that are easily offended. Then the Feelers rounded off the night. I snuck off early to bed so I could get up and blog this. I expect to see quite a few red eyes this morning.

I have a few photos from the session but for some reason I can't get the memory sticks to work in my notebook. I also noticed my wireless lan card has an interesting curve in it. Time for a service I think.

More tomorrow.

Wednesday, August 31, 2005 7:51:48 AM (New Zealand Standard Time, UTC+12:00)

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