Omahans show their love for Whidbey
The Omaha .NET User's group had a great meeting tonight -- I just wish somebody from the Venus team could have been there.
The evening started off with Joe White doing a great presentation about FxCop. I really like his demo showing how FxCop caught a potential I18N error that could have been disastrous had the code made it into production. Darn Germans and their mixed up use of periods and commas... :)
By the way, Joe has a Wiki for FxCop, but I didn't get the URL recorded. I'll get that posted up ASAP.
It was my turn next. The presentation went better than I thought... well feared... it would. Started off with a quick overview of Longhorn covering WinFx and WinFS. Then I moved into Indigo. One of the best questions of the night was “if we're already do remoting, what do we do?” My answer was “don't panic, but don't plan to do many more. Use Web Services.” Covered Whidbey next. There were some “ahhhs” when I talked about VB.NET's using statement. Generics got more interest than I expected for C#. I was kind of surprised that not more folks had cheers for XMLDataAdapter, though. Maybe in the next few months, I need to do another presentation about System.Xml in Whidbey. Finally, I covered Yukon. I saw a few nods talking about having the CLR in process.
But the real show stopper was the “no code demo.” Anybody that's ever suffered through one of my presentations knows I just can't resist writing code live. Tonight, however, I demonstrated MasterPages, Themes, GridViews and Site Navigation without touching the keyboard.
“Give it up for the ASP.NET Team”
Good round of applause.
“Show your love for not writing code!”
Bigger round of applause.
I think they got it and saw the value. Yeah, I do worry about Whidbey doing too much of the work for me. But that's a fear I can live with.
More importantly, by the end of the night, I had several people come and just say thanks for the presentation. That's the best return on investment you can get in this business, I feel. Folks, it was really my pleasure to deliver it. Especially knowing there wasn't a Toastmaster doing an evaluation, or an “ah counter” recording my gaffs.
Here's the presentation, if you're interested.