Apr
01
posted at: 7:50 PM
Erika and I were in Orlando, Florida this past week for Microsoft's bi-annual DevConnections conference. This event features a variety of employees from within the Microsoft development community. Some of them employees for Microsoft, some not. It was interesting to contrast the liberality of opinions for emerging technologies between those who work for Microsoft and those who don't. That said, I'm not sure "liberality" is even word.
While Erika did not attend the conference itself (she actually laid by the pool, and is subsequently now more tan), a coworker of mine did join me for the sessions. While many talks covered existing .NET development topics such as .NET 3.0, ASP.NET Ajax, and N-Layer architecture, the topic for me personally that was of exceptional interest was LINQ.
LINQ is an upcoming technology for .NET 3.5 that allows you to query against a collection in memory as opposed to the standard data access method, being direct SQL access using ADO.NET. LINQ will actually generate the desired SQL for you, and like ADO.NET, can handle your INSERT and UPDATE statements for you, as well.
The other exciting topic was ORCAS, which is Microsoft's code-name for the next version of Visual Studio. I was particularly happy to see that they are seriously revamping the ASP.NET Design View, which has been the laughing stock of .NET developers worldwide since.. well.. it came out. You can now nest Master Pages, add CSS rules visually, and even debug your javascript using breakpoints and watches.
Aside from all of the learning, the three of us greatly enjoyed ourselves racking up plenty of schwag and taking in Orlando with all it has to offer. Erika and I even went to Disney World for a day.