Looks like quite a few bloggers have already posted their thoughts on the Developer day event at Reading last Saturday. I'm last off the block now cos I was tied up at a client site (not literally :-) ) with no email for the early part of this week.
Overall I would say I was only 40% satisfied with the event. There were too many tracks and too many sessions in each track to do any justice to the topics. There could have been 3 2-hour sessions in each track. Some of the presenters visibly struggled with trying to finish up in time and skipped some good slides leaving us to go pick them up from the site when they become available. (No blame attached - i would have done that myself- still , its quite a pity). So here are my thoughts on the sessions i attended.
ClickOnce Deployment - I arrived late for the event so i missed the first half of the session. But the part i caught seemed interesting enough and well presented.
Custom Attributes: This was the most disappointing session - for my expectations that is. I attended the same topic presented by Jim Cooper at DDUG a few months ago which was quite interesting. At that session we had closed with a brief look at AOP and a pointer to the Advanced Attributes book. This time, when i read the abstract, it promised to deal with AOP so i decided to attend (even though i am generally familiar with the whole concept). But there was absolutely nothing (except a pointer to the book again). The chap next to me who was from a C++ background drifted off into a short nap. Jim could have explained even the WebMethod and the Serializable attributes and what they do to give newbies some context, but he didnt. Jim is a likable chap but this session didnt show him at his best.
FxCop: Talk about deflating a balloon. I never knew how hard it would be to write custom rules in FxCop. I really like the tool and wanted to see how they have improved it in Whidbey but we didnt get that far. I expected that we could use the CodeDOM and iterate through code using regEx to identify non standard patterns, but no joy. FxCop works at the IL level so you need to write code that can handle that level. It does help that there are some VISIT methods that can be overriden (that is if you fancy learning about 200 different overrides) but i dont think that i want to go down that route. And why didnt MS release some good documentation about it? Heaven knows!! My enthusiasm is somewhat tempered, but it doesnt mean i cant use the tools and enable/disable the existing rules as appropriate.
Web Services: Contrary to many peoples' opinion, I thought Benjamin Mitchells session was really good. The session has to be understood in context. A vast amount of advancements in .NET relating to Web Services is in the WSE stack. Ben was dealing with the improvements in the .NET framework core which obviously is less flashy than what they are doing with WSE. The summary slide is something I can make use of at work in a future knowledge sharing session in my company.
Scrum and Iterative development: Fairly good stuff. Interesting that they used sprints of 30 days. IMO 3-4 weeks is better than the XP style 2 weeks.
Career Development: Very interactive session since it was about the job market and CV /interview tips. Didnt mean much to me personally since im quite comfortably esconced in my current job, but the other attendees seemed to love it.
Would have liked to attend Ian Coopers session on Data Access Patterns, but then i was late anyway.
Todays DNUG session on FIT, NMock and Python promises to be interesting. Lets see how it turns out.