Wow. What a week.
I managed to pull off a user group talk at the IVCUG on Wednesday about Custom Attributes and Interception. Let me tell you, if you though the material was hard, try learning it well enough to be able to congest it into 75 minutes. It took me a night and a half to figure out how to approach the subject matter in a presentational way and I think I kinda pulled it off. Only 2 people seemed to be napping during the talk (which was very VERY technical) and I think I got the message across about interception in the real world.
That same day, a few hours earlier, we held the first Israeli technical chat at Microsoft Israel with .Net Deep Dive registered attendees. Let's be honest - It kinda sucked. Several problem occurred -
- The inability for most of the "Experts" in the chat to type Hebrew into the chat window was one of the worst. I mean - this is a Hebrew chat after all. The thing is even if an attendee asked a question in Hebrew and the expert answered them in English it didin't work - you would see Question marks instead of the attendees "quoted" question. That also means goodbye after-chat-transcripts.
- People were'nt tuning in, and if they were there were very little questions being asked. Hey- get lots of smart people in a room and don't ask any question - that's just wrong, man...
- Over all about 27 people were in the chat room at peak time. That's not enough. Especially considering the fact that over 2000 registrations have been made.
There's definitely some lesson in there...
More news about the Deep dive event: over 2000 registrations and currently, I'm frightened delighted to find out that about 1400 of those will be in the "Tools & Practices" course. I have to wonder if creating a presentation which involves two virtual PCs running at the same time and displaying about a dozen tools that don't necessarily play well with each other in front of 1400 people is a good idea. The demo-gods will have no mercy. In fact, I am preparing a special chant which I will do right before the first talk, audience included :)
Even more news!
Addy Santo is coming over in the coming days. I've worked with Addy a few years back and he's a wonderful guy, Ever since he took the red pill though we've seen him almost zero times which is a shame. In any case, Addy has been working hard at MS in the whole area of smart office apps and InfoPath in particular, so it was a pleasure to find out that he will be doing a special "InfoPath for architects" talk in the coming .Net Architects users group. I bet it's going to be very interesting - he's a great speaker.
News from the wild
- Omer talks about the possible need to explicitly declare methods as final or virtual instead of letting your language of choice decide it for you.
- Oleg keeps on blogging like crazy about all things XML.
- Udi talks about the evils of overtime and I completely agree. He then also writes about code readability and quality. That means each line of code is a sentence in a paragraph. Which is kind of what I always tell people when I see their code: "Make it read like a book". It makes all the difference in the world.
- Yosi Taguri asks: "How can we make Localization better in VS.Net?" I think he wants an answer in the comments. Got any answers for him?
- Natty Gur keeps on writing great posts about architecture of enterprise applications. I wish they could be a little more readable but if you stick with it he has some amazing knowledge in the field.
- Ido Samuelson wants your take on Exception Management strategies. My take to his question is "Yes - you should have "DalExceptionBase" "
- Guy Sofer uploaded a small project to GDN called Simple Threading Queue Pool . Interesting..
- Anatoly tells us about the "Google Desktop search +" thingy.
- Taras talks about : "Flexible Renamer" (I just use my Total Commander) and leads to screenshots of the upcoming MSN toolbar suite (sweet!)