Yesterday was another successful Day of .NET in Ann Arbor. I didn't hear how many attendees were there, but the crowd seemed as large as this spring. Dan Hounshell and I drove up together and listened to several Hanselminutes on the way up (and several on the way back). We got to Ann Arbor Friday just in time to be harassed by Michael Eaton because, being from the balmy south, Dan and I were both in shorts.
My presentation on software architecture was one of the first sessions of the day. I like having that first session, so I can just kick back the rest of the day and be an attendee. Since I think it went pretty well, I can now admit it's the first time I did that presentation (and it probably wasn't too hard to tell because I did stumble on a few things (what was I going to talk about on this slide again?) ) I had some good interaction with the room, which I hoped for with this topic. And the number of attendees surprised me. The room was full, with people standing at the back. I never dreamed that a bunch of developers would be interested in an architecture presentation. Just goes to show what I know...
In case you weren't in Ann Arbor, I'll be doing the same presentation this Wednesday at the Dayton .NET Developers Group. And I'm scheduled to present at the Cincinnati .NET Users Group in March, and might do the presentation there. Who knows by March?
After my session, I saw Josh Holmes speak about the DLR, which I enjoyed, although I could have done without the sales job on TDD (not a bad sales job, just not necessary). Next came lunch, which was a box lunch this year rather than Domino's pizza. I prefer pizza, but the box lunch was okay. I went to the Red Gate vendor session, which was not much new to me. I've always liked their products, just wish they cost less.
After lunch, I attend the ClickOnce and Beyond session from Curtis Gray. Unfortunately, he had technical difficulties which delayed the start of the presentation, and somewhat crippled it, because his slide were not available. The unfortunate result was that there was plenty of ClickOnce, but little Beyond. But I still enjoyed his presentation and chatted with him in the hallway between sessions.
Speaking of technical difficulties, in the next session I attended, Mark Miller decided to pull the power from his laptop, which for some reason hosed the output to the projector. He actually did a good job of explaining his presentation on events and delegates with no computer, including using the chalkboard (yes, chalkboard, not whiteboard). He recovered his laptop by the end of the presentation and was able to show us some of the things he talked about.
The last session of the day was Dustin Campbell talking about the new extensibility mechanism that will be available in .NET 3.5 using the System.AddIn namespace. He did a good job of walking through all of the code to create a calculator application that would accept plug-in calculator engines. There were a lot of assemblies, but that doesn't bother me as much as it does other people. I've been following the blog from the team developing this code, so I was happy to get a look at it in use. I'm definitely looking forward to this capability.
And even though I didn't win any prizes, I did get two shirts: a T-shirt as an attendee, and a polo shirt for being a speaker. I'm sure you'll be seeing me model both at future user group meetings. It was my third Day of .NET and it was just as enjoyable as the previous two. Look for me at next springs's event.
5 comments: (+add yours?)
Thanks Joe for the great talk and support. I know we all appreciated you driving up and speanding the day with us.
It was my pleasure to speak and attend. It's a great event and well worth the trek up from southwest Ohio.
Hello,
I enjoyed your talk. The one thing that gave me a chuckle was when you said that the enterprise architects were the ones with their heads in the clouds, creating standards that no one will follow. It’s funny because it’s so often true. I am moving more towards the enterprise architect space and I wonder, what could be done to create standards that are actually implemented?
On a different note, the reason I asked about security was because of Michael Howard's MSDN article. He pointed out that “many security vulnerabilities are not coding issues at all. Many are design issues.” I wager security awareness is taking on increased importance as part of the architect’s toolset.
All in all, I’d say your session was well worth it. Thank you.
J Wolfgang Goerlich
Lessons Learned from Five Years of Building More Secure Software
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/11/Lessons/default.aspx
Thanks for the comments and the link to the security article. I wholeheartedly agree that security is becoming a much more important item for architects; I don't gloss over security concerns as much as I may have earlier in my career.
As for creating standards that people will follow, I have a couple thoughts:
1. Minimize the number of standards you create. Fewer standards are more likely to be followed.
2. Create tools to implement standards. One good way to get people to follow standards is to make that the easiest way to do their work. This might be a library or template project, or a batch file to create the standard directory structure. (Of course, this won’t work for all things…)
Good points, thank you.
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