DevConnections, Pt 2 - mike's web log/comments

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November 07, 2007 | DevConnections, Pt 2 | 1439 hit(s)

One surprising, um, feature of the conference is that wifi access sucks unbelievably. There's no problem in getting a connection to the conference wifi, assuming you're within, like, 100 feet of their router. Which the session rooms aren't. But even if you can get "connected", it all seems to depend on what subnet you're on, or whether the net connections are already maxed out, or something. It's kinda random. "It's Vegas!" says the guy next to me. Once you're in, you're in, but you're otherwise spending your break time staring forlornly at the Wireless Status dialog box. If you're reading this, I finally managed. If you're not, I didn't.

We had the keynote ~~last night~~ Monday night, in which Steve Guggenheim had the perhaps unenviable task of pulling together everything Microsoft is up to in 2007-2008 under a single messaging umbrella. Considering that this is a conference for ASP.NET, Visual Studio, SQL Server, Mobile, and SharePoint (and Office), it was an impressive feat. Key word: "virtualization." Tuesday morning, Scott Guthrie got to talk (at 8:00am[1]) about just ASP.NET and VS 2008, which, in usual ScottGu style, somehow made everything he talked about seem really quite simple and straightforward. Nice demos, including as a kind of gee-whiz demo a Visual Studio extension for World of Warcraft.

The Mandalay Bay people who are in charge of catering are impressively uber-organized. You don't just wander over to a table of bear claws; nope, they have major traffic control going on, rerouting from buffet table to buffet table as the crowd thickens and thins. Everything is well spaced out so that you don't get clumps of people. (Except at the toasters, for the bagels.) The next time I host a party for 5,000 people, I am definitely hiring these guys.

The weather outside, I'm told (haha), is nice. Inside, they have the air conditioning turned up to Arctic Blast, and at lunch yesterday I had to make the long haul back to the room to get another layer against the icy breezes. I was finding it hard to pay attention while my hands were going numb. Then again, I seem to be unusually sensitive to drafts. Another sign of incipient oldguyism, perhaps.

Actually, I have been outside. Colleague Erik and I wandered down the strip last night, nominally in search of dinner, but really (in my case, anyway) just to have a look. We made it down to Caesar's Palace or thereabouts, which in normal terms might be, what, two miles? But in Las Vegas terms was, like, 5 casinos. I kept saying "I can't believe how big everything is!" like some rube. Which I suppose I am, if I keep saying things like that.

People everywhere are quite friendly. I mean, Las Vegas people; no comment as such on conference attendees. I'm not sure why I should find this surprising. It is the hospitality industry, after all. And it's the West, where everyone is all, like, howdy and stuff, right? I haven't actually had the chance to check this theory first hand at the "gaming" tables just yet. In the olde days, as I recall, the dealers wore tags that stated their first name and their putative city of origin ... "Frank Toledo" or something like that. I'm noting that the cities of origin, at least at the Luxor and Mandalay, have gone missing. I also notice that a lot of the dealers seem to be Asian. Maybe this has always been the case, or maybe working in Las Vegas has attracted people who have experience in gaming, or maybe it's just a good place to come and get work, period.

Oh, and I have attended some sessions. Most intense session: Kit George's "deep dive" on LINQ. He deconstructed LINQ syntax, explaining how it implements and/or relies on features like ~~dynamic~~ type inference, lambda expressions, anonymous functions, and so on. I hung in there, but I sure couldn't repeat it all back to you. Anyway, that was great. Best preview of new stuff: Eilon Lipton and Scott Hanselman's overview of the forthcoming ASP.NET model-view-controller architecture. Most practical session: Brad Millington's session on the ListView and DataPager controls. This is info I can use, like, tomorrow. The rest is still out on the medium horizon for me.

Today it's WPF, WCF, and (gulp) Windows Workflow for me. Speaking of which, off I go.

[1] Yet again the Early Riser contingent is in charge. If it were up to me, the first sessions would start at like 10:00am. Or maybe later.

Sabrina 07 Nov 07 - 9:43 AM

I heard there's a cool workshop called "How Sitting By The Hotel Pool And Reading Helps You Program Better"

Eric Lippert 07 Nov 07 - 9:44 AM

I have never been to Vegas, but it sounds fascinating.

One minor point that I want to clarify because it is a point of frequent confusion: LINQ relies upon implicit static typing, yes. But it never relies upon _dynamic_ typing, not ever. The type of every expression is known at compile time and the compiler takes advantage of that knowledge. We never defer type analysis to runtime (unless the user does so explicitly with a cast operator, etc.)

mike 07 Nov 07 - 12:56 PM

Sabrina, I was thinking about attending that session. I understand it's a session that's more popular each day of the conference, especially the afternoon session. FWIW, tonight I'm attending the Blue Man Group Helps You Program Better session.

Eric, you are correct, I misspoke. In fact, Kit showed that the compiler knows the type of, effectively, the right side of the expression and can therefore implicitly type the variable on the left. His simple example was something like:

Dim i = 5

but of course the real use in LINQ was for:

Dim q = [query here]