*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Yesterday was the Day of .Net hosted in Ann Arbor.  It was great to see tons of people I haven’t seen in years.  I went to several talks including Dustin Campbell’s talk on Reflection.  I learned more about reflection during Dustin’s talk than I ever wanted to know.  I also went to Dan Hibbitts talk on Mobile Software Factory.  Rounding out the day I went to Mark Miller’s talks on WPF and WPF/WCF.  I have to hand it to Mark, he did a really good demo of WPF and WCF whereby he built a hockey game whereby one could be the server and the other the client.  Moving the mouse on one application moved it on the other.  From the gaming industry standpoint this is nothing new since network games have done this for awhile.  However, it was a great WPF and WCF demo to show tcpBinary messages being sent from application to application. 

As Dan has already vocally exclaimed on my other post I killed the projector during my talk.  My talk was scheduled during the last session of the day and I was ready.  What I wasn’t ready for is about 45 minutes into the session, right before I got into the really cool demos of deploying the application using ClickOnce, I kicked the power cord out of the socket and took down the projector.  If you know projectors at all you know they don’t like being shut off without warming down so essentially I took the projector out for the remaining of the talk.  Let me apologize to everyone for robbing you of what was going to be the best most well thought out earth shattering demo you would have seen the entire day.  🙂 

For those that are in the area I promise to makeup for it Wednesday when I speak at the Ann Arbor .Net User Group.

In the morning I’ll be jumping on a plane and leaving the great state of Mississippi.  Destination, Day of .Net in Ann Arbor, MI.  Technically I’ll be staying in Livonia, MI which is about 20 miles from Ann Arbor since the up and coming week I’ll be working onsite at Quicken Loans.  Day of .Net is going to be held at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor where I used to teach so I’m looking forward to going back to Ann Arbor. I haven’t been there since I moved in 2005.

At Day of .Net I’ll be doing a talk on Smart Clients.  I actually wanted to do a talk on Workflow Foundation but Jason Follas hates me and thus I am doing Smart Clients.  I think he secretly wants to learn more tips and tricks from me so he can make more money as a consultant selling Smart Clients.  I’m onto you Follas!  🙂

Several days later, Wednesday to be exact, I’ll be back in Ann Arbor speaking at the Ann Arbor .Net User Group organized by Darrell Hawley.    I’ll be doing a brand new talk that I haven’t done yet nor have I seen anyone speak about.  Hopefully it will be beneficial for everyone and it will keep the tomatoes and eggs thrown at me to a minimum.  Here is the abstract:

Structure and Guidance for Organizing Applications within Visual Studio

Visual Studio is an outstanding tool when it comes to building applications on the .Net Framework.  It can be confusing for users when trying to initialize a new software deliverable though.  For example, how do you name your projects?  Where do you put third party assemblies so they can be re-used?  How do you set things up for an n-tier architecture?  And the list goes on.  I’ve given various talks throughout the US and it never fails that I end up in a conversation with multiple people on what are the best ways to organize projects within Visual Studio.  This session should answer these questions and provide some proven guidance that works.  In this session we’ll cover some best practices on how to organize your projects and solutions.   We’ll also look at some tricks and guidance on how to map your folder structure to your namespaces.  During the session we are going to build a new application from scratch and cover how to initially incorporate an n-tier design when initializing your project.  Even if you are an experienced .Net developer this is one session you will not want to miss!

I look forward to see old friends, new friends, team members, ex-students, faculty and more this week.