Dev::Blog

I finally made it to a Metro Toronto .NET User Group meeting last night. The format was great, with 4 short talks ensuring that if something was too far out of my area of interest the night wouldn’t be a write-off. As it happened, they were all excellent.

I especially enjoyed Mark Piotrowski’s introduction to Dali - I was about to do another search for a simple O/R mapper and this looks like it might fit the bill, assuming I can get it working with MySQL. I’ve been split between code generators and ORM lately, with both the commercial stuff I’ve seen and our homegrown semi-solutions not quite fitting, but this looks like it might be something I can evaluate without having to book a day or two of work just to research. Cool.

Also, Jean-Luc David did an XNA demo, and attempted to make Pong funner by applying a guitar theme, including power chord sound effects and use of a Guitar Hero controller. He did a good job of using zoom during his demo, but made one crucial mistake - when doing a demo involving power-chords, if you’ve got the opportunity to boost the speed of an object from 3 to something else, do you pick 7, as Jean-Luc did? No. You pick 11.

The other two demos (Rob Windsor on encryption, Randar Puust on Silverlight) were good as well, but as I won’t be doing anything with them in the next few weeks, I can’t do much about them other than to make some mental bookmarks (and no, I won’t be making a pong game either, but any excuse to get Guitar Hero…)

Wow, it’s like my Twitter drop-off extended to this blog or something. (I’ll be back on Twitter when AIM integration is working again, or when I can get around to finding a desktop client, honest!)

One cool thing I can talk about is Toronto Code Camp which went down swimmingly this past Saturday. This was my second time, and the first one gave me so many tips and tricks that it probably saved me a week or two or three of work over the following year. This year the seminars I chose were more refreshers than brand new things, which can be good too - it’s sometimes really helpful to review material that you’ve already been exposed to, and I’m not at all trying to suggest I knew more than the presenters.

Best in show (and first of the day… hmmm…) for me was probably Shaun Hayward’s talk on building plug-ins and inspecting classes with reflection. I’d done some work with plug-ins in my last job, and a few situations have popped up recently where they could be helpful, so I was grateful for the chance to review the technology. Of course, I didn’t get any breakthrough ideas because my brain always asks “what’s the stupidest thing I can do with this API,” and hopefully I’ll have a worthy answer for this later in the week.

I also enjoyed Mike Culver’s talk on Amazon S3 (and other APIs) - we’ve used them a bit already, but I’ve booked some time to take further advantage. Conference co-ordinator Chris Dufour gave a great talk about WCF that I termed my “medicine” talk - I wanted to go to the XNA session, but I knew this would be better for me in the longer term. Chris did a great job presenting some material that’s often pretty dry.

Probably the biggest thing I got from the day (besides winning a copy of Essential Grid) was confirmation that Microsoft technologies are alive and well. Most of the meetups and shows I go to focus on open source linux stuff, and while MS still skews heavily towards the enterprise, I did manage to find one or two people who did something other than Sharepoint. Encouraged by this, I’ve promised myself I’d spend more time on C# and ASP.NET outside of the office, and I’ve secured some hosting to play around a bit. What fun!

Technorati Tags: Code Camp

This may be old news for some, but if you’re looking for online tech talk videos, Google has a whack of them (254 of them at last count) covering a range of topics: Link.