I Survived TechEd
I feel like I need a T-shirt that says "I survived TechEd". It was my first time at TechEd and no one can really prepare you for how much work and play takes place at a huge conference like that. I had a BLAST. Our VB6 to .NET migration talks went well but I think by far the most fun was working the Visual Studio booths (so much so that I stayed longer there than I signed up for). I also did a .Net Rocks! show on VB XML Literals (I'll let you know when it goes live) and hung out at the MSDN booths for a bit playing with the new Social Bookmarks and Feeds. Oh yea, and lots and lots of parties (I'm pretty good at those ;-)) Lessons Learned: Next time bring more business cards. I ran out the second day!
Booth "Duty"
I say duty but manning the booth really didn't feel like a chore at all. The most fun I always have is talking to people about what they work on, then trying to understand their business challenges and hearing what technology decisions they've made. Most folks I spoke with were government employees (agriculture, energy, defense, and a couple people building applications for local police as well). Other folks were building or maintaining departmental applications in large corporations. Fun stuff.
It was also great to hear that most people I spoke with had downloaded and were starting to use Visual Studio 2008. There was lots of great feedback here especially related to IntelliSense and of course LINQ. Many people wanted me to show them how to do something in LINQ as it seemed that they were still trying to get their heads around it all. Some people I spoke with didn't realize that LINQ isn't just for accessing data in a database. LINQ is a way to query any collection, be that in-memory objects, XML, or even over in-memory DataSets.
I think my favorite moment was when I worked with a developer that was trying to search an XML document using the XML DOM and we moved the code to LINQ to XML and queried it using one LINQ statement -- thus eliminating more than a page full of code. I also showed XML IntelliSense in VB by including a schema in the project. I pointed people to the downloads section of the Visual Basic Developer Center to install the XML to Schema tool which automatically infers the schema of XML data. It'll be good to get this tool baked into SP1.
There were also a lot of good discussions at the booth on LINQ to relational data (SQL, Entities, DataSets) and which approach is best in what scenarios. I got a couple "not another data access technology" vibes but once I explained them as options on top of ADO.NET rather than replacements I think people were more at ease. I showed a few people how you can take advantage of LINQ without having to re-architect your data access layer at all. I also pointed people who know T-SQL but are trying to learn LINQ to a series of blog posts the VB Team is putting together on "Converting SQL to LINQ" that show translations of a variety of statements and scenarios.
VB6 to .NET Migration Talks
The VB6 to .NET Migration topic had a great turnout. What was a bit surprising is that even though the Interop Forms Toolkit has been out for more than a year, it was news to almost everyone. Folks planning a phased migration should really get the Interop Toolkit and the Power Packs into their arsenal.
This topic had two sessions that I did with Rob Windsor (VB MVP) and Paul Yuknewicz (colleague at Microsoft). We did one TLC in an "interactive theater" located on the trade show floors as well as one "birds-of-a-feather" (BOF) discussion. The TLC we presented in similar format to the Webcast I did with Rob that you can view here. The BOF was really more of an interactive discussion and the group had some great challenges and we addressed many architectural options for migration. The discussion also included a couple great folks from ArtinSoft who provide migration tools and consulting.
VB6 to .NET Migration resources:
Enjoy!
Beth is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Community Team at Microsoft and is responsible for producing and managing content for business application developers, driving community features and team participation onto MSDN Developer Centers (http://msdn.com), and helping make Visual Studio one of the best developer tools in the world. She also produces regular content on her blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/bethmassi), Channel 9, and a variety of other developer sites and magazines. As a community champion and a long-time member of the Microsoft developer community she also helps with the San Francisco East Bay .NET user group and is a frequent speaker at various software development events. Before Microsoft, she was a Senior Architect at a health care software product company and a Microsoft Solutions Architect MVP. Over the last decade she has worked on distributed applications and frameworks, web and Windows-based applications using Microsoft development tools in a variety of businesses. She loves teaching, hiking, mountain biking, and driving really fast.
