Done! - Rick Strahl's Web Log

Done!

November 10, 2007 @ 1:31 am- from Las Vegas

Yup I'm done with conferences and a couple of projects that have been sapping my energy for the last couple of months. You've probably noticed that the frequency of posts on this blog has dropped a bit in the last few weeks. With DevConnections over I'm finally past the threshold of pain <g> and I can get back into a more 'normal' routine...

You'd think with having done the conferencing gig for 10 years I'd get used to it but no matter how it ends up there's always a tremendous amount of stress that surrounds getting ready and even being at these events. It doesn't help that several conferences usually fall into a span of a few weeks in the fall and spring. For me this ended up being the last in a string of three conferences plus a few user group presentations in the course of a month... and I can't tell you how nice it feels to just be DONE!

Vegas Wrap up

Regardless of the stress as always the actual conference ends up being a blast. Truth is that I enjoy giving sessions and the whole social aspect that goes along with a conference like this. I wasn't entirely happy with some of my sessions having veered a little off path. Part of it was that I had a couple of sessions that were a little too widely focused resulting in a lot of content trying to squeeze into an hour and requiring a shitload of preparation that caused some loss of focus on my part. The Html Alternatives session in particular was a tough one to get ready for and I was up almost all of the last night trying to get it done and tweaked. Oh well... next time <s>.

I've had a number of extremely engaging conversations in the course of this week at DevConnections both with other speakers, folks from Microsoft as well as several attendees. Being an independent developer who lives in various ends of the world removed from normal society I guess this is my chance to get out and mingle a bit with like minded folk.

Among the highlights were finally meeting and hanging out with Rob Conery. Rob's also from Hawaii and so he's also got this laid back attitude that I can immediately identify with and is hard to describe unless you've spent a bit of time living in Hawaii. I ended up spending a lot of fun time hanging around with Rob, Phil Haack and Jon Galloway for some engaging discussions around ASP.NET in general and the new MVC framework over what seems like an awful lot of beers. There was a lot of back and forth regarding the new MVC framework. Rob and Phil both got hired by Microsoft recently to work on MVC particularly and while both of them are new and just getting involved, it's been fun to toss the ball around with the folks 'on the inside' (since there's no public access to the MVC framework at the moment). I have mixed feelings about this new framework - while I certainly have issues with Web Forms (who doesn't) overall I think the framework provides the functionality to build Web apps effectively. MVC addresses a few obvious issues like testability, but there's a lot of stuff that hasn't been addressed just yet in the MVC stuff that's been shown. One important thing that hasn't been discussed yet will be some sort of 'control' or reusability model. I certainly don't want to go back to generating all of my HTML markup for every sort of 'control' by hand using script code or purely static ASPX controls (which is all that's been shown so far - and which I would foresee being a bad match for MVC). But at the same time I can also envision MVC re-invigorating the ASP.NET platform which seems to have gotten a little stale recently with lackluster improvements since ASP.NET 2.0. I'm curious to see what the early bits look like and what opportunities there are to build maybe a more lightweight and low level framework. I've been down this path a few times with several iterations of Web frameworks I've built some time back and I'm wondering what opportunities there are to build on top the base MVC framework. I just love the 'world building' scenario <g>... I wasn't quite ready for it when the original ASP.NET was put together (in fact it'd be almost another two years almost before I even got close), but this time around it's another story. We shall see...

I also had some fun discussions with a number of attendees after sessions as well as one great discussion with MVP Jim Wooley about Data Access on the Microsoft stack. One thing that's interesting is that there's so little talk and discussion about these new technologies like LINQ to SQL - it's strengths and weaknesses - at this point just before imminent release. It seems either that very few people are experimenting with this stuff or haven't been pushing it hard enough yet which is in a way very scary. Well, Microsoft has one more shot at this with the ADO.NET Entity Framework. Let's hope they make the most of it... I'm actually leaning towards just giving up on the MS solutions and going with one of the existing frameworks like nHibernate, Subsonic, llBGen or whatever...

Conferences are as much about socializing and off the cuff discussions that are more honest than what you see in typical online communities because it's face to face and often in a more casual setting over a beer or 5 where it's easier to be honest and say something not so popular in such an environment without getting lynched online <g>. It's interesting though to hear both the things developers are excited about and things they are adjutated about and it seems almost there's an equal amount of both. One comment I heard over and over is that many people are just incredibly overwhelmed by the wide array of technologies constantly being thrown at them by Microsoft. There seems to be no more time to let technology gel and let best practices and patterns emerge. And I'm not talking about some pointy head architect coming up with a guideline and putting it into the MS Patterns and Practices library a week after some new technology ships, but about real life experience in projects that have been around long enough to actually warrant strategy and pattern discovery. This stuff takes time and a stable platform that doesn't go through radical change every two to three years is a requirement to make this happen. I doubt that this trend of tech overload will change, especially since it's not unique to the Microsoft stack... and the alternative of falling behind doesn't sound enticing either. What to do? Shlog along for now I suppose...

Anyway, it's been a blast and it's like a huge rock's been lifted of my back. Done! Yeah...

Feedback for this Weblog Entry

re: Done!
by Stephen November 10, 2007 @ 5:16 am

Hey Rick... I attended 2 or 3 of your sessions, sorry i messed up before the first one asking you "if this was the same you did last year".... i recalled almost as soon as i walked away after asking that it was a Dave Sussman session from a previous DevConnections... my apologies for that

Can you share that "tinyurl" link you had at the end of of the UI session? I know you ran over on time and that link wasn't up long enough to jot down or snap a pic

And also a thanks for including Flex into that last discussion, as I hear about it a lot on some forum I spend a lot of time at, and it was good to see even a basic example displayed...

re: Done!
by Phil November 10, 2007 @ 9:00 am

Hi Rick

It was interesting matching a name with a blog with a face. I enjoyed your LINQ and ASP.NET presentation the most. The room was packed, and it was a venerable data access geekout session. You brought a great speaking + interacting style to your presentations (also in the webapps presentation).

I agree with you that MS is 'pushing' a lot of new technologies. I agree that it's in their best interest, but as a developer, I can only experiment with LINQ right now until I get a full understanding. One thing I learned is that the demos you see with LINQ are ALL basically client-server demos, with LINQ code snippets right in the presentation tier. The biggest thing I brought home with me is that LINQ belongs on the DAL tier. (thank you to Dino Esposito for that one) I am not comfortable in giving up control of which SQL statements are actually being executed on the data store. Sure, you can wire the LINQ objects to sprocs, and thank goodness for that.

So will LINQ become ubiquitous and commonplace like the datareader/dataset? I suspect it'll be yet another choice in the toolbox. I just can't see the argument yet on why it's a better DAL strategy. Lower barrier to entry for new developers (not needing to know much SQL?)

re: Done!
by Rob Conery November 10, 2007 @ 9:35 am

I'm glad you still think I'm laid back after that political discussion I got into with Joe Brinkman :). It was... umm... animated :). But as you say - it's the best part of being there cause I could say the things I did (which would surely get me fired if I blogged them :) and we could have a good laugh.

I can't tell you what a relief it was to see someone else show up in their surf-shop attire (they're the best travelling clothes)!

Next time, poi's on me! And you WILL see the light with mVC...

re: Done!
by yaip November 10, 2007 @ 10:15 am

So are you done for this year or for good :)

# re: Done!
by parisianBlue November 11, 2007 @ 6:12 am

[Rick Strahl]
> people are just incredibly overwhelmed by the wide array of technologies
> constantly being thrown at them by Microsoft

The members of my team and I have chosen to ignore 80% of the "technologies." They bring nothing new or useful to the table. Microsoft has been playing catch-up for the last five or so years. By the time Microsoft throws a "new" technology, somebody else has already done it or proved the technology useless or unworkable.

> There seems to be no more time to let technology gel and let best practices
> and patterns emerge

The Microsoft Pattern and Practices Mannschaft is well-nigh useless. The boys live in an ivory tower. They have very little real-world experience and publish late. This past week, I've stumbled upon an obscure Swedish blog written in English. The author attended the parallel Microsoft conference held in Barcelona. A Microsoft honcho allegedly promised officially sponsored wikis. This may be interesting if it materializes. I hope Microsoft finds a little bit of money in its $40 billion cash pile to reward contributors of quality.

re: Done!
by Jon Galloway November 12, 2007 @ 2:06 am

It was great to meet you - one of the highlights of the convention for me. I'm looking forward to going through the slides from your presentations, since I wasn't able to get to them.

# re: Done!
by Brad Welch November 13, 2007 @ 2:01 pm

I enjoyed you sessions, Rick. I was really hoping LINQ, especially LINQ to SQL, would be our rosetta stone for data access. But I came away from the conference feeling it gets you almost there and then you have to do a lot of work to go the reset of the way. I'll have to load up 2008 and play...but I'm feeling like I'd be better off sticking with something like subsonic (and are we sure Rob wasn't hired on to assemilate it into .Net....resistence is futil). But hey, thanks for experiencing the pain for us. I wish MS would come up with some kind of unified theory to data access for applications rather than these "Way Cool!" ways of doing things that we ohh, ahh and drool over....but wait, they tell us, we really shouldn't do that in a real app.

And I'm sorry to say I laughed at your flight woes as I was reading you post while sitting in the LV airport waiting to depart only because I use to work for USAir (NOT the friendly skies). Then I got on my, gulp, USAir flight to SF only to find out that the pilots flight plan didn't match up with ATC and we wouldn't be leaving on time and that we had another chance to leave in 45min and if we missed that we couldn't leave for 7 hours. Either way I knew I was screwed for making my connection. We did manage to leave 45min later...but when I arrived in SF I found I had to leave the secured area to get from one concourse to another (lame) and make a flight in 15 minutes. And SF security is the slowest of any airport I've encountered they do all but scope you. I was sure I had missed my flight to Eugene....but wait, that flight was 3 hours behind schedule anyway. Midnight and we're waiting to board and they're telling us several times over that we'll probably have to divert to another airport because of weather. No diversion and finally I'm in Eugene 5 1/2 hours after leaving LV. Oh, and a co-worker who didn't leave LV until mid-night arrived on a direct flight 15 minutes after I did. I don't have to wonder why I don't attend more conferences.

re: Done!
by Jim Wooley November 19, 2007 @ 2:06 pm

Rick, it was great to meet you as well. I only wish I would have been hanging around the conference a bit more instead of having to book out after sitting in the hallway for 1/2 hour chatting. Hopefully I'll see you on the circuit now that my book is almost done.