Canberra VS Launch Day
Well, it's over a week late, but I really wanted to blog a couple of things about the VS&SQL launch that happened in Canberra last week. I've already blogged the Launch Party that was on the night before, but this time I'm talking about the real launch - the one that included a free lunch :)
Other people have already blogged about the day (as Frank mentions here), so I really don't have to say much about the whole day itself.
But there was a couple of points I wanted to make. Some are even important. Well, one might be.
- The day was very cool. While there wasn't anything new for me to learn, it was still great to be reminded of it all.
- I'm sick of clunky-to-say product names. While I thought WCF and WWF were bad (and are :) VS, SQL and Biztalk are also bad. The 98 in Windows 98 is easy to say. So's the 2000 in Windows 2000. 2002, 2003, 2005 - none of these roll off the tongue anywhere nearly so easily. After spending the day where the most common sentence included the phrase '...Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and Biztalk Server 2006...', damn I'm sick of both hearing and saying these lines - all those 2005s get very clunky when wrapping your mouth around them. From now on, I'm going to refer to each one as VS8, SQL9 and Biztalk3 (I think it's three...). If you don't know your version numbers, look them up! Actually, I'm still quite partial to the code names. You'll still likely still hear me say Whidbey and Yukon too.
- Andy, Chuck, Anthony, Rob, all you guys are fantastic presenters.
- The last session Andy did in the day included some VSTO demos. It was in C#. It's sad - the rest of the day had been entirely in VB, which was nice to see for a change - a lot of demos and presentations I see these days are C#, which bums me out :)
- Probably the most important point deserves to be broken out of the list to become the remainder of the post...
During Chuck and Anthony's demo of ASP.net 2.0 Chuck made a very important point, which is just not stressed anywhere near enough in demos, samples, etc.
While demonstrating the ease at which some stuff could be databound, Chuck the time to point out that in any serious application there's no way you'd want to bind directly to database tables or procs, but should bind to your datalayer, and the same datalayer every time. They did it because it was the fastest way to demo the bit they were showing, but it really impressed me that he took the time to say it.
Why do so many samples and demos bind directly to the database tables? Actually, I know why - speed and simplicity. The example is for the bindable control, not the binding source. But surely they could all include little (I'd prefer big) disclaimers, preferably with links (in big bold text) to examples of writing decent datalayers and stuff?
So well done Chuck for an aside that is so easily skipped over and ignored. You get my vote for sexiest Queensland-based DPE of the year!