Today was a definitely a lucky day; I barely made it for the flight from
Ontario airport and even
though my baggage was tagged “late check-in”, it still arrived with me to
Vegas.
Rob Walling and I got to
Mandalay
Bay around 8:45 and after a smooth
registration, we were all set for our pre-conference sessions starting at 9:00
AM. This is my second year at devConnections and I’ve found this conference to
be an informative learning experience and socio-nerd networking occasion. The
speakers are top-notch professionals with technical insight and there are
always good sessions available in the simultaneous conferences if you don’t
find your chosen track satisfying.
For further session
My first session this morning was Ken Getz’s Windows
Forms, Beyond the Basics. The agenda of the session comprised of the following four
topics:
- Asynchronous
Programming and Windows Forms - Using
Graphics with GDI+ - DataBinding
and Windows Forms - Printing
in .NET
During the first half of the session, Ken Getz did a great
job in explaining the first two topics; Asynchronous programming with windows
forms and Graphics with GDI+. In a Threading 101 way, he provided an in-depth
explanation of performing day to day multi-threaded activities without touching
System.Threading namespace. The topics of context switching, time slicing and
thread mapping are sometimes counter intuitive however with just the right
amount of code, examples and demos, it was made quite interesting and easily
understandable. Along with a thorough explanation of background worker
component, he also discussed three timer controls provided with .NET framework (windows.forms.timer,
System.Threading.Timer and System.Timer.Timer) and their appropriate usage in
preemptive, deterministic and cooperative task management.
WMI -
Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is a powerful tool which can be
used with Visual Studio.NET to associate raw power of machine related
operations with .NET framework. Ken gave a demo about how can an application
determine if web server status has been changed (stopped, started, re-started).
I asked Ken about his code samples and he emailed me back saying
“Here are the three projects I made up on the fly this
morning. The rest are posted at www.mcwtech.com/2006/devconnections.”
-Ken
Ken Getz on the fly presentation slides and source can be downloaded from here. His blog can be found here.
Since Robert Green’s Data Binding was not exactly beyond
basics, with organizer’s permission I moved in to Dino Esposito’s “Developing
Rich and Interactive ASP.NET Controls”.
Dino’s presentation was mostly focused on the following four
topics.
• Building controls from scratch
• Building controls from existing controls
• Injecting script
• Reflecting on ASP.NET AJAX Extensions
In his usual style, Dino dissected the ASP.NET user controls
and kept the emphasis mainly on the scripting and code generation for state
persistence by the controls.
Click to download the presentation slides and source. Thanks for Dino to providing it.
Due to an assignment, I had to miss the evening Microsoft
keynote, heard from Rob it was ok. Last but not least we got a bunch of goodies in a cool bag; more swag
on the way.
Hopefully there would be no duplicate network SSID issues
tomorrow. Gotta catch some sleep to get ready for tomorrow.
