Kevin Daly

Tip for NZ Daylight Saving changes

Those of us working in New Zealand will probably be aware (or should be aware) that our government in its wisdom decided on very short notice (on the principle that Anything I Don't Understand Isn't Important) to extend daylight saving from this year, basically to squeeze more money out of the tourists.

The updates for Windows are mostly available, but there is nevertheless room for uncertainty about whether any given machine has been patched.

A nice feature added to the DateTime structure in .NET 2.0 is the IsDaylightSavingTime method, which enables the following expression which can be run on any machine in the NZ timezone to test whether the daylight saving patch has been applied:

new DateTime(2007,9,30,3,0,0).IsDaylightSavingTime()

So there you go.

Belated TechEdNZ07 Wrap up

 I originally meant to blog at least once a day during the event, but unfortunately I forgot to take the charger adapter for my Harrier (yeah, I know. I'm so embarrassed).
I didn't get back till Thursday night and I've spent a couple of days catching up on things (and sleep).

Since I obviously didn't attend every session any impressions I give of the dominant themes are naturally coloured by my own interests (although I will refrain from discussing young women with feathers on their heads, despite having found that very interesting).
    One standout though not only from my own impressions but from talking to other developers was Silverlight: actually, I'm very pleased about this because it means that I'll be able to bring it up as an option without spending so much time trying to explain what it is. Of course the really cool stuff will come about a year from now (guessing wildly) when 1.1 becomes available.
I think Silverlight will also provide a pathway for some developers leading to WPF, which hasn't received the attention it deserves outside compulsive early adopters like yours truly. Partly I think this may be because Microsoft oversold the designer/developer split, leading many developers to assume that WPF wasn't for them. I expect this to change.

Another biggy was obviously Visual Studio 2008, although I was surprised that more wasn't being made of it. 
   Of the features that will actually be available when Visual Studio 2008 is released (so excluding Silverlight 1.1 and the ASP.NET Futures stuff), the most significant in terms of new language/platform functionality (as opposed to IDE improvements) is probably LINQ...we all tend to zoom in on LINQ to SQL but I hope people don't ignore the other flavours: I recently worked on adding support for some fairly complex new business rules to a commerce site, which involved writing predicate syntax queries against generic collections - a very cool feature of .NET 2, but it would all have been much, much easier with LINQ.
   As regards LINQ to SQL, I do hope developers will see it not so much as Just Another ORM or Something The DBA Probably Won't Like and actually get a feel for the benefits of adding querying capabilities to the language itself (seeing beyond the database scenarios will help in this).
  I'm curious as to what LINQ to XML might be able to bring to the interaction with POX web services, although in those cases where XML-RPC is used, it's so bloody awful I doubt anything would help (no doubt Darryl would say I was being cynical about that :-) ). But that's not the fault of LINQ.
  The LinqDataSource for ASP.NET should complete the process of making drag-and-drop databinding for web applications backed by a database not only useful but also respectable. Being able to bind to ObjectDataSources and thence to TableAdapters in VS 2005 was a good step in this direction, but maintaining the relationship between database, adapter, datasource and control can be a source of pain and anguish (and cryptic error messages), so LinqDataSource is a very welcome addition. 

TechEd keynote

After the usual noise and fluff that preceded it Lou Carbone's keynote was actually very good...I'd expected a lot of marketingspeak so it was a welcome surprise.

TechEd 2007 (NZ)...The Foremath

(Well,  if you can have an aftermath, why not a foremath, eh?)

Next week is TechEd week here in New Zealand (well, in Auckland, which qualifies as New Zealand if you want to stretch a point...although I've always regarded it as Greater Sydney)

There should be a lot of interesting content this year, especially with the 2008 wave within smelling distance of release and the ever-nifty Silverlight attracting a lot of attention.

I've attended every TechEd of the honest-to-goodness-actually-released .NET era, but until this year I've never been able to attend the drinks on the last day because I've always been in a mad dash to the airport at that time.
Fortunately however, this year I don't fly out until Thursday, so I'll finally be able to stay for drinks on Wednesday as God intended.

Of course, if anyone has any good ideas about drinks at any other time I'm always open to constructive and imaginative thinking on this subject.