Heading off to MVP Summit

March 11, 2007 @ 3:25 pm- from Maui, Hawaii

Ah, it's that time of year again - I'm heading off to the MVP summit later tonight. I've had issues getting a flight out of here so I'm a little late taking the red-eye out of here getting there tomorrow around noon.

The Summit is always a fun event, as much of a social, schmoozing thing as anything and I'm looking forward to see some of the familiar faces and some new ones I suspect - lots of new MVPs are getting added each year. I know many of you readers are MVPs so I hope to see you there.

I'm especially glad to head off tonight because I've been kind of dragging for the last few weeks. I've been heads down with (several) project work with barely any spare time for any fun endeavors - coding or otherwise - and the Summit gives me a little break. I'm also looking forward to getting a kick in the ass hopefully with some new ideas of how Microsoft is trying to tie the pile of technology coming down the mountain together.

Recently I've once again have felt incredibly overwhelmed by all the new stuff that's arrived since .NET 3.0 got released and trying to put it into perspective of building real usable applications. And getting up to speed on the various technologies. The benefits of most of the .NET 3.0 stuff is immediately obvious, but getting proficient in the 4 pillars isn't exactly a piece of cake.

More specifically where to put my energy and focus? There's so much new stuff to learn and piece together. So much stuff - much of it half baked - and more arriving all the time. It's getting ever harder to maintain a perspective of the big picture. On a more personal developer level - what do you focus on? Specializing seems to be the only way to keep in the game these days with there being just too much technology to be any good as a generalist. It's enough to drag you down sometimes.

So the Summit is usually Microsoft's chance to 'sell' developers on new stuff and solicit input. We're off and running to the next wave and I'm sure Orcas is going to figure heavily. I've been spending some time with it when I've had an idle hour here or there, but it hasn't been enough to really get a real good feel for things. Of all the things that look interesting Linq/Dlinq and ADO.Next are probably the most interesting, now that the technology is finally getting to a point where it's usable. I'm also interested to hear something - anything on plans moving forward with MS Ajax and Visual Studio. Looking at the JavaScript support in Orcas so far has been very disappointing given that all the focus appears to be on support for MS Ajax and very little improvements for supporting generic JavaScript.That's a huge bummer. But it's early and hopefully that will change in the future.

So hopefully there will be some incentive to get juiced again. Often times the excitement isn't the Microsoft sessions but talking with other developers and seeing what others are doing and playing with. I'm looking forward to some late night discussions over Sushi...

If you're going - I hope see 'ya there and be sure to stop and say hello.

Posted in Personal

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re: Heading off to MVP Summit
by Bertrand Le Roy March 11, 2007 @ 9:26 pm

What kind of generic improvements were you expecting for JavaScript IntelliSense? There's actually not much (property/event icons) that is specific to ASP.NET Ajax so your comment is a little puzzling to me.

re: Heading off to MVP Summit
by Rick Strahl March 11, 2007 @ 11:06 pm

Bertrand... from what I see the editor Intellisense does not see any class detail if you're using closure based class, prototype sytnax. I haven't played enough with it to see if it recognizes JSON style classes. Inside of a closure class this. does nothing. This stuff seems to work only with MS Ajax client library classes and using type descriptors. I do see classes listed when I use new but that's where it ends. Classnames I can usually remember - the members are the problem <s>...

Also, one thing that I think is REALLY important even if the support for generic classes worked better is some sort of code navigator that shows functions/classes. How else can you really manage a JavaScript library like the MS Ajax libraries for example? Ctrl-F doesn't count <s>...

I mentioned this to Jeff a while back and he said that this wasn't in any plans, but I think that's a crucially important piece since JavaScript will often be stored in unmanagably large files for download optimization reasons.

re: Heading off to MVP Summit
by Jeff King March 12, 2007 @ 11:48 am

It's too bad to hear that your perception of JavaScript IntelliSense is that it's primarily targeted at MS AJAX. We've really deliberately tried to build all features for generic JavaScript usage. The only exception was really (as Bertrand said) the icons. I view the prototype model IntelliSense support and XML comments as generically applicable.

Here's my summary of your requests:

1. Closure Support - We actually want to enable this feature but haven't had the time to do so thus far. This would include the handling of the "this." syntax which currently doesn't do anything.

2. Object Browser - While this is on our list, I think there are higher priority features (formatting, better debugging, code navigation) before we tackle this one. That's just my 2 cents.

Anyhow, thanks for the feedback!... it priceless in refining our designs.