Mad about .NET

Presenting at large events such as TechEd

Filed under Development

INETA APAC is organizing a series of best practices webcasts of interest to the community. The webcasts apply to all members of the community, leaders, user group members and MVP’s, who might not yet be at the stage where they speak at large events. The topic would be of interest to all, and would help more people to aspire to be speakers, and get an understanding of what is involved in being a good speaker.

Here are the details of the first webcast:

Best Practices Webcast: Presenting at large events such as TechEd

Session abstract: Presenting at large events such as TechEd involves a lot of preparation. Too many speakers leave far too much to chance. Doing a good job does not happen by accident. In this session, Greg will share experience and tips related to the process of getting selected, preparing content and delivering that content. Many of the tips can also be applied to improving the delivery of technical material in classroom or user group situations.

Presenter Bio: Greg Low is an internationally recognized consultant, developer and trainer. He is the country lead for Solid Quality, a SQL Server MVP and one of only three Microsoft Regional Directors for Australia. Greg also hosts the popular SQL Down Under podcast (www.sqldownunder.com), is a board member of PASS (the Professional Association for SQL Server) and an author with Microsoft Press and Rational Press. He regularly speaks at large events around the world.

INETA APAC invites you to select a convenient time of your choice for this webcast, fill the survey(takes less than 3 minutes) and we will notify you of the final survey results and the exact webcast timing.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=AdhgSxdrRqvyUP9KZQRWpA_3d_3d
Please note that Survey closing date is : May 4, 2009

PDC and TechEd 2008 Hangover

Filed under Development

These last weeks have been quite frenetic for me. I've moved to a new house and before notice I was sleeping in a different house I woke up in a plane going to LA for the PDC, 3 days after I was back from the PDC I went to Amsterdam for the quarterly meetings of my company. Again after 3 days, I was in Barcelona for the TechEd. I guess you imagine how has been coming back to the office.

I must confess I'm not used to travel that much in a short time, I normally do it once a month and is more than enough for me.

The thing is now that I'm back at home and up to date with the work, at least as much up to date as I can be, I start feeling the hangover of the PDC & TechEd. They look already very far away, but I have not been able yet to digest all the cool things I've seen at both events.

I hardly believe I was able to talk in person with people I usually follow like Anders Heljsberg, Maoni Stephens or Joe Duffy.

I really don't know where to start  Windows Azure, Windows 7, Windows 2008 R2, Visual Studio 2010, Oslo, Geneva, .NET Framework 4.0, C# 4.0 ...

I'm so excited about most of the things that were announced that I would like to have more hours to check all of them.

Post Event: Re-descubriendo LINQ

Filed under Development

23rd, October I did a session about LINQ for the .NET User Group  Madriddotnet.

During the event we tried to know more in deep how LINQ works, from C-Omega to LINQ to SQL, doing an attempt to solve many of the questions that normally arise when you want to obtain the most of LINQ.

We found Visual Studio 2008 comes with a nice bunch of samples to helps us including visualizers like the Expression Tree Visualizer, which allows you to see the expression tree created from our queries and the LINQ Query Visualizer to see the translation done to Transact/SQL. We knew that it is possible to create queries on the fly using the Dynamic Query Library

We also talked about the benefits of the expression trees and the visitor pattern. You have some sample implementations like the one done by Matt Warren

In the last part of the event we focused on tips for LINQ to SQL to move to a multi-tier architecture. We explained how easy is to serialize LINQ entities to be used over WCF on both directions, this is from Master to Detail and from Detail to Master. How to workaround the fact that circular references are not supported by default by the DataContractSerializer. We gave some ideas about how to do local change tracking of entities when we are disconnected from the DataContext, providing some examples of complete implementations like the one done at MSDN Video (Spanish).

As you can see we talked about many different things and we verified how LINQ can help us during our day to day work making our life much easier if we apply some good practices.

If you attended to the event I hope you enjoyed as much as I did.

Post Event: Descubriendo el CLR

Filed under Development

On Tuesday I did an online webcast about the CLR. I hope the people who joined us enjoyed the event and found the contents interesting.

The event was recorded and you can download it from the Microsoft Events website (Spanish).

During the presentation I did a demo in which I was showing how we can see with WinDBG when a method has been jitted or not. We saw it for the constructor but I stopped before show it for other methods to avoid wasting too much time on the same thing.

One of the attendees has asked me today why the method was shown as not jitted even after it was clearly executed. The problem was simply that I attached WinDGB to the release version of my demo application and the JIT optimized the method replacing it by an inlined version. If I had attached the debug version this would not happen and the method would be shown as jitted. If you want to have more information about it I widely explained in a previous post about Inline methods where I used the same demo application as in the webcast.

Baleares on .NET - Heroes Community Launch

Filed under Development

March, 28th we celebrated the anniversary of Baleares on .NET.

I would really like to thank all the speakers for coming to such important event for us Eladio Rincón, Juan Manuel Servera, Rodrigo Corral, David Cervigón, Miguel Jiménez and David Salgado.

All of them made possible to host what at the end was an incredible day, I hope they enjoyed as much as I did and that they come to visit us again in a near future.

You can see some of the photos we took here.