Yesterday I attended the Microsoft DevDays 2005 in The Hague. The MSDN TechNet briefings in Veldhoven I attended last year (was that October or November?) were great. Because the DevDays would (or should) be even greater I could hardly wait for DevDays 2005 to begin! Here’s my short opinion on the DevDays 2005. Interested in a more elaborate version? Comment!
Delegates can be seen as interfaces for methods. Let’s look at an example of a delegate and what it really represents.
delegate double Calculation(double one, double two);
All this line of code really does, is tell the class it is in that there might be one or more methods with the given signature: a method returning a double and taking two doubles as parameters. You cannot call a method Calculation now, because it does not have a body, so it doesn’t have any functionality. It’s just a blueprint for future reference. You’re saying something like: “You might find one or more methods somewhere having this signature which do something for you, but don’t ask me where or what they are called. Just be ready!” Next, let us create a method with the same signature as the delegate.
When using XmlSerializer in .NET on a self-made class, you might receive the FileNotFound exception at runtime upon instantiating the serializer. You don’t get enough info to debug this problem, and the filename of the file it didn’t find can’t explain much either, because the dll-name is different ‘garbage’ every time.
My provisional program for DevDays 2005:
09:30 Keynote: Microsoft Developer Tools Strategy
Prashant Sridharan (Microsoft)
10.45 Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005
Lex Oskam (Microsoft)
13.15 Indigo update
Gijs de Jong (Microsoft)
To be honest, I’m glad I’m not on an ASP.NET project right now. I saw ASP.NET 2.0 in action last Friday, and I would go crazy if I would have to do an ASP.NET 1.1 project now.
2.0 and the new Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) take a lot of ‘standard work’ out of the developers’ hands, making development much faster. It begins with something as simple as leaving the cursor where it is while switching between views. You’ve got button1 selected? Go to your HTML and the cursor is at the beginning of the button1 tag. In source view, select table3 and switch back to design view and, you guessed, table 3 is selected.
Currently I’m reading the Microsoft Press book “Developing web applications with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and C# .NET” by Jeff Webb. (This book is part of the very interesting “MCAD/MCSD Self-Paced Training Kit“.) I borrowed this book from the Microsoft Library here at my new job. They’ve got a very wide variety in books! Another plus to add to the list.
This is the first in what I hope will be a lot of posts here on my newly created weblog. I started blogging at Google’s blogger, but then I wasn’t aware of the possibilities bloggingabout.net brings you! So now I moved my blog here, to be able to give my opinion about all kinds of (developer related) stuff, and off course just for the fun of it. I’ll try to keep you posted!