As promised, and a little late, here are my Mind Maps. Thanks for staying on me about these Adnan, I need a little motivation from time to time.

Below is a list of the 19 sessions I attended at DevConnections, with a link to each map. Enjoy!

If you don’t have MindManager, you have two free options for viewing these maps. You can download the viewer here or you can use the browser plug-in, which can be found here. I know I promised that I would publish these as PDFs as well, but these maps are too big and have too much information to fit on a single PDF page. If, however, you want these maps and don’t want to download any of the software, post a comment here and I’ll post them for you exported to Word.

• Hands on Visual Studio and ASP.NET 2005 (Paul Litwin)
• Microsoft Keynotes (Charles Petzold and Scott Guthrie)
• Inside SQL Server 2005 (Matt Nunn)
• Lap Around the New Enhancements for Web Developers in Visual Studio 2005 (Jeff King)
• Using Visual Studio Team System to Build Enterprise ASP.NET Web Applications (Michael Bundschuh)
• Developing Rich Web Applications with ASP.NET “Atlas” (Jonathan Hawkins)
• Tips and Tricks for ASP.NET and VS 2005 (Bradley Millington)
• Data Access in ASP.NET 2.0 (Bradley Millington)
• Applying Object-Oriented Principles and Design Patterns to Web Development (Bradley Millington)
• Formulas for Effective User Experience Design (Mark Miller)
• Migrating from Web Services to SOAs (Dan Wahlin)
• Passing Data Between Tiers: The Strategies (Craig Utley)
• ASP.Net 2.0 Script Callbacks (Dino Esposito)
• 10 Essentials for a Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Application (Michele Leroux Butamante)
• Building Portal Applications with ASP.Net 2.0 Web Parts (Dino Esposito)
• Unify Windows Forms and ASP.Net Security Models (Juval Lowy)
• From UML to the Visual Studio 2005 Class Designer: New Tools for OOP, CBD and SOA (Nickolas Landry)
• Mastering RSS Feeds using the System.Xml Namespace (Dan Wahlin)
• C# and Visual Studio 2005 IDE (Juval Lowy)

DevConnections, ASP.NET, C#, Mind Manager

I know I’m a bit late in posting this, but I’ve been catching-up and spending time with my wife since I returned from Viva Las Vegas. Better late than never, here are some thoughts on my post-Con session:

I had originally intended on attending Dino Esposito’s “A Crash Course in ASP.NET Control Development” session, but decided during the week to switch to Juval Lowy’s “C# 2.0 and Visual Studio IDE” session. I couldn’t resist having an opportunity to get some in-depth info on C# 2.0 from a man who has had a big hand in shaping this round of improvements to the language. He crammed a ton of information into one day, but somehow managed to get through everything by 4:00 PM. Here’s the agenda:

• Visual Studio 2005 IDE
• Delegate Interface
• Generics
• Anonymous Methods
• Iterators
• Partial Types
• Misc Features
• C# 2.0 Refactoring
• ClickOnce Deployment

That’s a week’s worth of content! But somehow Juval managed to get through and not leave us all blindsided. Now I’m not going to lie and say I was on the bus the entire time, I did feel that Juval did a good job of gearing the materials towards someone who was already familiar and had developed in C#, but was attending in order to get the goods on the new language and IDE features.

My favorite segment was the first, a great look at a number of new features in VS 2005. Some of my favorites were:

• Improved “Go To Definition” - For .NET Framework types, this new feature includes a WinCV-like browser which actually takes you to a pseudo-header file for that type. Try it on System.Transaction and you’ll see what I mean.
• Code formatting - For picky C# developers, you have full control over the format of your code under Tools | Options | Text Editor | C# | Formatting. You can also Export those settings into a vssettings file for import by another developer or even place the settings file on a share for use by an entire team. This I like!
• Tab Options - This is tiny, but nice. The context menu for tabs includes some new options. Among them are “Close all but this,” “Open containing folder” and “Copy full path.” All very handy.
• Debugger Visualizers - This is probably my favorite new feature. In debug mode, you can now visualize complex types, rather than digging through the objects in a Watch window. One example is the DataSet Visualizer, which looks great! Even better, you can create your own custom Visualizer for any type in the Framework. Juval showed a custom bitmap Visualizer and a wav file audiolyzer as examples.

Another great thing about the post-con session was that I had the privilege of meeting a fellow developer and blogger whose site I had been reading all week. His name is Adnan Masood and I highly recommend his site. I’ve added his blog to my reader and plan to keep reading his site.

Adnan actually commented on my last post and asked me a great question. When am I going to post my MindMaps? As you probably know, I used MindManager for all of my note-taking last week and even evangelized the tool to a couple of people I met at the con. (Adnan’s friend Jeremy included!) I had intended on “cleaning up and organizing” the maps before I posted them, but I realized that I’m too much of a perfectionist and would take forever cleaning my 16+ maps up. So I’ll bear my soul and just throw them out there… tomorrow. I’ll post the raw MindManager format and a PDF format for each. When you read them, don’t hold any spelling of grammatical mistakes against me… It’s all very fast-paced at these cons.

That’s all for now. I know I still owe you a couple of in-depth reviews of two of my favorite sessions. Don’t worry, they’re coming.

Just finished a session with Michele Leroux Bustamante entitled “10 Essentials for a Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Application.” Good talk. She had a ton of information to cover and didn’t get through everything, but did a good job with the volume of information. I had a feeling that this session was going to be high-level and a bit of repeat, but I was drawn to it to hear those 10 things that are a must for any and every ASP.NET 2.0 application. I felt that it would give me a list of things I need to be sure to get the goods on before that first 2.0 project. I’ll happily share them with you now:

1. Page Layout and Design
2. Dynamic Navigation
3. Data Access
4. Personalization
5. Localization
6. Cache! Cache! Cache!
7. State Management
8. Role-based Security
9. Reduced Attack Surface
10. Component Design and Deployment

If you want more info, check out MLB’s blog or the DevConnections site in the coming days for slides.

Next I have “Building Portal Applications with ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts” with Stephen Walther. Should be a good talk.

I have some session-closing activities after that talk and don’t plan on blogging tonight (internet access in the hotel is $12/day), so this will be it for me. By no means am I done with DevConnections posts though. I still have a session tomorrow and some previous talks I want to share my thoughts on. Over the next several days, I plan to post about the following:

• A talk on effective User Experience Design given by Mark Miller of Developer Express. I really enjoyed this talk and learned a thing or two I’d like to share.
• A talk Jonathan Hawkins gave on ASP.Net Atlas. This was a great preview of what’s to come, but the bits for Atlas are already available. I want to share some things I learned about Microsoft’s next big thing for ASP.Net.
• A brief commentary on Swag. (The other) Brandon and I are collaborating on this one, with his help, it might actually be funny.

A big thanks to Paul Litwin, all conference organizers and the sponsors for putting on a great conference! I really enjoyed the speakers, the content, the other attendees and even the hotel. It was very smooth IMHO, especially considering that we had 3000 people! Paul, if you’re reading this, good show! While I have you, I do have one major suggestion for next year:

Have a talk on User Experience design for the web, similar to the one Mark Miller presented in the VS track. I enjoyed Mark’s talk and I learned a lot. I’d love the same concept target at web developers.

But great job overall! See you next year!

DevConnections, ASP.NET, UX

I just got finished with a session by Nickolas Landry entitled “From UML to the Visual Studio 2005 Class Designer: New Tools for OOP, CBD and SOA” and I thought I’d post a few thoughts before my next session.

• ActiveNick is a great presenter who did a masterful job communicating a ton of information in a short time. This was not a light topic, but I felt that he broke the meal down into several edible chunks that made sure none of us left with information overload.
• The presentation was a great mix between slides and demos. The slides weren’t heavy and didn’t convey too much or too little information.

There were some great highlights from the presentation itself. Nick started with some arguments related to Visual and Domain Specific Languages and the UML:

• Developers are visual and we need visual, Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) to understand and model software. A great proof of this is the need for whiteboards in every developer cubicle and conference room.
• UML was created in 1996 to be that visual DSL, but how many of us actually use it to model our software products? Even for those of us that do use it, how many of us use it to generate code? Nick asked for hands on those two questions and only half of the 200 attendees actually model in the UML and less than 5 (people, not percent) actually try to generate code from the diagrams.
• Basically, use of the UML has shown no significant increase in productivity, no significant change in the way we create apps and the language doesn’t address a number of key design issues in software (like database design, testing, deployment, component-based development and UI construction).
• In addition, because the UML is technology-agnostic, you can’t cover language specific nuances or synchronize you models and code. This lack of synchronization between the UML diagrams we create and our code means that UML becomes useless as soon as scope- or feature-creep occurs.
• But on the other side, if you introduce new stereotypes and tags to the UML to account for language-specific features, the UML is no longer Unified. Ever wonder why Microsoft has avoided integrating UML diagrams into the IDE? I think this talk really settled that for me.

So do we scrap the UML? Of course not. Agile development has been created as an adaptation of the UML to answer many of the concerns Nick surfaced above. But agile doesn’t answer issues related to our technology-specific development and the need for model-code synchronization. All hope is lost again…

But wait! There is hope in the form of the new Visual Studio 2005 Class Designer, which comes packaged with the Standard Edition and above. Some specifics:

• The new Class Designer was created to produce diagrams using UML artifacts, but it supports .NET design concepts and language nuances. It’s also strongly tied to the CLR type system.
• The designer is fully integrated into VS 2005 and provides code gen and synchronization.
• You can generate diagrams from code and use the designer as a great tool for refactoring.
• It’s not a perfect tool and it doesn’t do everything. However, along with a code gen tool like CodeRush, the designer can really cut down development time for classes.

Some of the features of the tool are:

• A way to visualize class hierarchies and their relationships. Basically, it does a great job of visually mocking my lack of skill in creating useful and reusable classes.
• View/ Edit class details.
• Roundtrip engineering between code and design.
• And it supports all .NET language nuances.

But Microsoft isn’t trying to be a UML killer here. All they offer is the class diagram at this point and they have no plans to integrate other diagrams into the IDE. Visio is still their recommended tool for diagram creation with the UML (Although I would recommend a tool called Enterprise Architect by Sparx Systems).

That being said, Nick recommends that we start using the new Class Designer for a number of reasons:

• To understand existing code- While Nick was talking, I used the designer to load classes for a Windows Service app I created earlier this year. See my point above about being mocked by the tool.
• Graphical class design- Seeing what we’re creating and have created has immeasurable value to most developers
• Review and Refactor code- It’s not meant as a refactoring tool, per se, but it’s a great visual first pass for developers.
• Documentation is always in sync- The best reason, in my mind. Synchronization means that scope- and feature-creep don’t render my hard documentation work useless.

So if you haven’t yet, give it a try. Open up a .NET 1.1 application in 2005 (the import wizard will make a copy, don’t worry) and generate a class diagram for your solution. It’s an enlightening and encouraging sight.

Thanks for giving a great talk Nick. One of my favorites at DevConnections so far.

DevConnections, UML, .NET, VS 2005, ActiveNick

After a couple of featherweight sessions in the morning, I got some real treats yesterday afternoon. This was a full day with three sessions in the morning and three in the afternoon, plus Microsoft on trial Unplugged in the evening.

My three afternoon sessions were all that I had hoped they would be. Between a 2.0 version of Scott Guthrie’s famous ASP.Net Tips and Tricks talks (Not given by Scott though), a great real-world look at Visual Studio Team System and a great preview of Atlas, I got more information than I could hanlde. I’m not going to share anything from the VSTS talk in this post becuase I have some great stuff from the other two and I want to keep this post shorter than a novel. I’m also going to sit on my thoughts about Atlas because I want to put all of my thoughts in one well-written post. Tips and tricks will have to suffice…

By the Way, If you’re at DevConnections, you’re reading this and you were at any of these sessions, please drop me a comment here. If I missed something you found to be useful, if I got something all wrong or if you just wanted to share a thought, please post. I’d love to start a dialogue about what we’re learning this week. I’m open to trackbacks too, so you can even pick up the discussion on your own blog and link back to me.

Tips and Tricks for ASP.NET and VS 2005 (Bradley Millington)
Summary: Bradley Millington, of the Microsoft Web Platform and tools team, gave a great talk about a number of new ASP.NET 2.0 features that haven’t been highly adversised, but are pretty ground-breaking. Here are a few I found interesting:

• Cross-page posting
• URL Rewriting/ Remapping - Enables the use of “vanity” URLs instead of lengthy URLs with QueryString values.
• Building a Custom CMS with the FileSystem provider - I really want to spend some more time on this section, but I want to do some more research and make an entire post out of this. For now, this feature basically allows for content to be served from non-file system locations. This was a feature built for the SharePoint team, so I would imagine that there is a ton of depth and potential here.
• Client Scripting- Some of the new features in client scripting include simplified script registration and the ability to set the focus of the page on an error during validation.

And that’s all for today. Tomorrow, I’ll continue with some brain dump on today’s sessions, including a get talk on SOA by Dan Wahlin and a great session on Script Callbacks by Dino Espsito. I’ve also updated by schedule for tomorrow. You can find it here.

Until tomorrow!

DevConnections, ASP.NET, .NET, Vegas Baby!

I didn’t mention this is my previous post, but yesterday was “Microsoft Day” at DevConnections and featured all Microsoft Speakers in our sessions. During the morning sessions, while I was feeling that certain topics were being brought up again and again, I was finding myself a bit annoyed at the Microsoft marketing speak that kept creeping in. As a result, I kept looking forward to the external guys I knew I’d start hearing today.

Paul Litwin, an esteemed co-chair of this conference, had a similar thought and asks is one flavor of speaker better than another? He argues that they are both important and I agree. I love the bleeding edge stuff and what’s new and to come that we always get from Microsoft, but I also tire of the marketing that creeps in. That’s why it’s important that we have guys like Paul and Dan Wahlin who live in and love the MS technologies. In fact, I was in a session with Dan Wahlin on SOAs and he wasn’t afraid to point out areas where VS 2005 lacks features needed for SOA development. This is valuable information I think we all need.

How about you? If you’re here at DevConnections and you have a thought, what is your impression of the Microsoft Day speakers? Drop me a comment here or leave one on Paul’s blog (or both). If you’re not here, but you’ve been at past conferences, drop me a comment on your past experiences. I’m curious to hear some of your thoughts on the value speakers paid by the software company versus adopters not employed by the company.

DevConnections, Microsoft, ASP.NET, Visual Studio 2005

I have a brief break before the final session for the day (AJAX… er, Atlas) and I thought I’d brain dump some things in the free time I have (rather than standing in line for swag… I know, you’re ashamed of me. You’ll get over it.)

This morning I attended three sessions that had some useful information in the minutae, but were basically a Microsoft rehash of what we already know. Some of it is stuff that Microsoft has been travelling-around talking about for months. Some of it was even a rehash of stuff I heard Paul Litwin and Scott Guthrie share yesterday. I could have used a bit less, but I understand that most attendees of these sessions didn’t spend the day with Paul and some didn’t attend Scott’s talk. In any case, I did extract some new gems that I had heretofore not heard. Not suprising though, I do miss things…

I’ll be happy to share below. BTW, I have been taking copious notes (using MindManager 6.0) and I do intend to publish these notes when they are a) free from my frantic typing mistakes and b) I decide which format to publish them in (HTML, PPT, PDF, Word, etc.) In the meantime, I want to keep it brief and give you some of the most useful things I’ve seen and heard.

Inside SQL Server 2005 (Matt Nunn)
Summary: This was basically another “Launch” talk about the benefit of SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk 2006, with the focus being on SQL Server. While the presentation was heavy on selling me on Microsoft tools, (I’m already here!) there are a couple of interesting points I pulled out:

• Matt had an interesting number about purchase decisions being made in the enterprise. According to the presentation, 77% of managers were aware of bad purchase desicions at their companies that were made due to limited information about tools and options.
• Big selling point for Microsoft: Platform integration means you don’t have to worry about which application can talk to which other application. I can see the lure of this, but isn’t that why we are all mad for web services? Platform integration just isn’t an option for most enterprises, so I don’t really see this as a selling point for the majority of prospective customers.
• Microsoft’s drive to be the platform of choice for enterprise applications appears to be working. Matt threw up a stat claiming that enterprises are choosing .NET 35% of the time versus 25% of the time for J2EE. I wonder if that “Platform Integration” point isn’t working after all?

Lap Around the New Enhancements for Web Developers in Visual Studio 2005 (Jeff King)
Summary: In some ways, this was a rehash of things we’ve been seeing for months (They’re loving that XHTML compliance and the fact that the IDE doesn’t muck with formatting anymore). That being said, I did find some good stuff in between the cracks. Some examples:

• Document outline view - lets you see the structure of your HTML in a neat, collapsed view.
• Dynamic complilation Model - the compiler even checks your web.config now… No more spinning up the dev site and seeing cryptic web.config errors due to syntax or capitalization issues.
• Obfuscate your HTML - believe it or not, you can actually deploy your site in a manner than puts everything in the bin directory. All you see in the web directory is nearly-empty stub files.
• You can pre-compile your site when you deploy it - No longer does the first user on the site have to sit and wait for the site to load the first time. What that probably means is that you’ll no longer be that first user, right? I know that’s what I’m thinking….

Data Access in ASP.NET 2.0 (Bradley Millington)
Summary: This was another rehash as the new DataAccess features are something Microsoft has been evangelizing for a while. However, I got some great depth on the ease of two-way data binding and the new ObjectDataSource. Some info:

• The ObjectDataSource - Finally, data binding to a middle-tier! Basically, this new DataSource allows you to treat another object as your data source. An example would be an “Orders” class that represents your middle tier to the orders table in the database. You can bind your entire CRUD layer through the object methods used for each transaction as well. In essence, you write your data access layer and the ObjectDataSource handles the appropriate calls declaratively. I can’t say enough how great this new DataSource is! Makes me begin to feel that Microsoft actually does like n-tier architectures…
• Two-way data-binding has gotten much easier. In addition to the old 1-way binding commands, there is now a “Bind” command that notifies the compiler of a 2-way binding.

I have a ton of good stuff on the afternoon sessions, but I’m spent for the day. Plus, I think I need to respond to a few work emails. Maybe I’ll sleep after that. Tomorrow I’ll play catch-up and bring you “DevConnections Day 2 - The After-Lunch Colada Post (A.K.A The Heavy Stuff)” plus all of my sessions for tomorrow.

BTW, I tweaked my schedule a bit today and made a last-minute swap in the afternoon (too much good stuff!). I’ve updated that and my schedule for Wednesday. If you’re interested in what I’m seeing tomorrow, click here. There’s a UX session in there…

DevConnections, ASP.NET, MindManager, .NET, Vegas Baby!

Well today has been a blitz of information, free junk and standing in line with nearly 3000 people (the most successful DevConnections ever, I hear!) I’ll do my best to quckly summarize the day, but I’m feeling pretty beat, so don’t blame me if this turns out to be worthless.

The day began with myself and my compadre (Also named Brandon if you are keeping score) paying way too much for coffee, two eggs, bacon and toast at a restaurant in the hotel. After we kindly tipped our brusque waitress, we headed to the registration area and picked up conference materials and the backpack provided to everyone (Nothing worth mentioning). It was nice to get a binder with most of the slides ahead of time. I’ll be reviewing these to see if the sessions look to be about what the speakers are claiming they are about.

After registration, Brandon and I parted ways; He to the “Build a VS 2005 Application in a single day” session and I to Paul’s “Hands On…” session.

Hands on Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2005 w/ Paul Litwin
Summary: This session was geared at presenting a number of important new features in ASP.NET 2.0 and giving the attendees an opportunity to use thse features in three hands-on labs.

My Take on the Speaker: Paul did a great job in this session and I really enjoyed finally having a chance to take one of his sessions. He’s a great trainer and knows the material well.

My Take on the Session: The setup and concept was great! There wasn’t anything presented here that I hadn’t seen or read about before, but this was my first chance to use these features, which really solidified them for me. It was a day of hands-on ASP.NET 2.0 training and exactly what I had hoped it would be.

Highlights:

• New Data Controls really do offer two-way data binding - I’m amazed at how simple it is to create a usable DataGrid (now called the “GridView.”)
• Data controls can now be implemented with no code - Everything needed to make it work can be stored in properties on the controls. UX Note: The sorting feature in code-less mode has no visual cue whatsoever for which column you’re sorting on and which direction you are sorting. In order to do this (which one always should), some code is required. Good of Paul to point this out.
• UX Note:When you change the underlying schema of a control (i.e. Table bound to a GridView), the IDE detects the change and asks you if you which to update the view.

I’ll leave it at that. I’ve got a ton of good notes, I may post an organized form of them at some point…

After the day-longs, Brandon and I lugged our materials back to the room and headed out to another overpriced meal. Then we waited patiently to be let into the main session area for the Keynote address.

Microsoft Keynote(s) - Charles Petzold and Scott Guthrie
The keynote for DevConnections was actually two keynotes. One by Charles Petzold and another by Scott Guthrie. I’ll briefly cover each here:

Charles Petzold - Windows 1.0 and the Applications of Tomorrow
This was a great tongue-in-check talk (circa 1985) about the new GUI OS Windows 1.0 and how programmers interested in long-term development should jump on the Windows bandwagon. This talk was pretty light-hearted, but I was reminded how far we have come in what we can do with UI (and how it’s becoming more important to consider our users as we can do more to confuse them). Here’s a trip on the wayback machine:

Scott Guthrie - ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed
Scott’s talk was pretty good. It was very demo-driven and consisted of a lot that I’d heard from him before and earlier today from Paul Litwin. There were a couple of highlights though:

• We watched a brief “Behind the Scenes” video that highlighted the structure of development teams, how they worked on a product and how intesely it is tested before shipping.
• UX Note: The XHTML compliance built into VS 2005 is just great. It targets multiple browsers and validates XHTML and accessibility. I can’t say enough about how happy I am about this. The IDE is even compliant when it generates code.
• UX Note: The IDE doesn’t reformat your markup when you switch to design view.
• UX Note: You can use the toolbox to drag objects right into the source HTML.
• UX Note: You can specify default formatting for HTML elements AND export those settings via XML to other instances (i.e. everyone on your team)

And there is so much more. All in all, VS 2005 is going to be the major rev that microsoft has been promising. I’m ready to use it now! well, not right now…

Now to sleep. Tomorrow will bring much excitement of its own. In that vein, I have finalized my schedule for tomorrow. Check it out here.

See you tomorrow!

DevConnections, ASP.NET, .NET

If you can’t get enough DevConnections from this blog, here’s a list of other DevConnections bloggers that will say it better than I could:

• Dino Esposito
• Don Kiely
• Paul Litwin
• Adnan Masood
• Tim Mitchell
• Dmitry Robsman
• Josh Christie
• Markus Egger
• Julie Lerman
• Paul Mooney
• Steven Smith
• Dan Wahlin
• Hilton Locke
• Michele Leroux Bustamante
• Brian Noyes
• Lance Robinson
• Nevin Liber
• Kate Gregory
• Scott Watermasysk

DevConnections, .NET, ASP.NET

Since my initial DevConnections post was lengthy, I decided to move my schedule to it’s own post. As an added bonus, I’ve decided on a few more sessions.

Monday, November 7

Tuesday, November 8

Wednesday, November 9

Thursday, November 10

Friday, November 11