SoCalDotNet Meeting VS 2010 Takeaways

I found myself in BuenaPark, CA this afternoon, and stopped in to hear Mark Rosenberg give a review and snapshot of the new features and benefits found in Visual Studio 2010.

Meeting starts at 6:30pm the 1st Wed of the month.  Pizza showed up prompt at 6:20pm.  Bring $7 for pizza ($5 if register online before noon the day of) and 1 raffle ticket.  Additional tickets are on sale 8 for $5.  Meeting info here.

The building can be found off the 5 & 91.  Can always go west onto the 91 from the 5 and go North, or right, on Knott.  Towards the end of the block, on the right hand side will be Village drive.  Turn East, or right, and find the third building on your left hand side.  Look for:

Partners Consulting’s 2d building
7101 Village Dr.
Buena Park, CA 90621  Map here.

http://www.partnersconsulting.com/

The meeting had 24 RSVPs and probably 30 by the end.  From the questions, it appeared there was an equal balance of VB and C# folks.    There was a balance of older and younger but overwhelmingly male developers in the audience.  (Sorry, that’s what a political science degree gets you)

Mark Rosenberg – VS 2010  First time I met or heard Mark Rosenberg speak.  Apparently, he was a founder of the SoCalDotNet.org user group.  He then went on to work with INETA at a much larger scale.  He said he’s in retirement to recover.  He’s teaching over at the Head Start – which is also hosting the SoCalDug.org SoCal Dot Net Nuke User Group on the 2d Wednesday of the Month (dark in November for holidays).
Mark did a great job.  He did most of the presentation demoing through the deck.  He’s funny – key – and quickly moved through the material without feeling rushed – very difficult – and with great understanding – can’t teach unless you know it.
Items I took away:
The IDE is a significant development milestone for VS making dramatic movement forward what with the new 4.0 .Net version, the new C# 4.0 version, now VB and C# are principally equal in development scope and all have a new CLR.  It will also sport a new DLR to support the dynamic libraries, i.e. F# 4.0.
There will be parallel processing occuring on non-related data sets.  When I saw Woody speak in San Diego, he demoed the effect by running a calculation process on 16,000 records in 3.5 and then in 4.0 with multiple threading occuring and there was a 20-30% increase in time efficiency, depending on how you looked at the results.
The UI features of the IDE will be significantly enhanced and include:  much improved docking controls, zoom capabailities (maybe turn a lean forward activity to a lean back?), smartened intelisense support including the ability to look up items but also stop the annoying traits of autocompletion, aka the “That’s not what I was thinking or typing” syndrome.
Mark also demo’d the new Deployment tools included within VS2010.  A developer will be able to use multiple config files during the deployment process.  I kind of saw it like JQuery type script where depending upon the environment, a particular script would call the particular config file and a unique database connection string could be created allowing ease in connecting the .Net framework to the database.  Deploying from a development environment to a production environment can be very challenging.  Add on the additional pressures associated with state of the world type stuff, internet piracy, hacking, identity theft, etc.  All  can lead to large, large lawsuits where companies fail to keep others out and sensitive data within.  This feature looks to cut down on risk facing many companies transferring information over the web.  Maybe this will be a new business line.  As more and more of Main Street is upgraded from the brochure in space web need to a dynamic, interactive business tool, more companies will face these pressures and risks.  This tool looks like it will at least help reduce risk.  ROI, we will have to see.
Silverlight:  A few takeaways from the meeting.
  • SoCalDotNet.org has a Silverlight User Group meeting that meets on the 1st Tuesday of the month.
  • There were quite a few devs asking great questions about Silverlight and VS2010
  • Q?  Will there be  Silverlight for 64bit OS: no.
  • Q?  WPF & Silverlight:  WPF and Silverlight will move along together in development.  Silverlight is moving ahead much faster as demand from the web grows.
  • Q? Ease of Silverlight:  Remember that Silverlight can be run with .Net or in an html page using only text pad and a browser.
  • Q? Integration btwn Blend 3 and VS2010:  Blend was a major jump ahead for MSFT.  Blend can edit code now.  But VS 2010 is a great upgrade when manually typing XAML Code.  And ultimately, the 2 will likely never become fully integrated.   I hope they do.
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