The post conference workshops were yesterday. There were only 5 to choose from, and 1 was the workshop I attended last year. The I chose to attend was not something I was super interested in, but it was the best available. The workshop had good material, but after 4 days, I was ready to go home.

Did I mention that I love Santa Barbara airport? All flights were on time and I got home by 10:15p.

Today was a great day at VS Live! San Francisco. The seminars I attended were all pertinent and well presented.

Food today- I finally found a place that serves a Monte Cristo sandwich. The silly thing was invented in San Francisco, but most sites that were returned from my Google search had to do with cigars and cigar stores. Mama’s
On Washington Square serves them up and someone wrote a review that mentioned
the sandwich. It was a long
walk (nearly 2 miles each way), and made all the longer by the enormous crowds in Chinatown. We sometimes had to walk in the street to get by. It was Chinese New Year, so maybe there were more people out than usual. There certainly were more kids than I would have expected to see on a weekday at 1pm. And sad to say, the sandwich was just not that great. It was small, and didn’t have a lot of ‘middle’ (meat, cheese) to it. But the excellent homemade jam compensated nicely. David ordered it as well, but he didn’t care for it at all and ended up only eating half.

I attended a number of seminars today, some were good (What’s New In SQL Server 2005 for Developers, Operator Overloading, Generics and BackgroundWorker in VB.Net) some were not so good (Stored Procedures with CLR in SQL Server 2005) and a couple were great (The ‘My’ Namespace in VB.Net, and Application Frameworks in VB.Net). I was irritated by the CLR SP talk because the speaker, William Vaughn, took up a bunch of time at the beginning telling jokes and relating personal political opinions. Thus, he had to rush through the actual content of his presentation, hold us over time and still not complete his presentation. I had heard he was a good presenter, but it did not show during this session.

2 pieces of information that I took away from the ‘My’ Namespaces presentation that others might be interested in:

1. When you set a VB.Net application to be a single instance application (via Project
   Properties) you can add code to the event handler StartUpNewInstance. You can also
   add code to the event handler HandleUnhandledException. If you add code to either
   of these event handlers (and possibly other new application wide event handlers) you
   must test the code outside of the debugger (Ctrl-F5). If not, the debugger will catch
   the exception before the event is fired.
2. I had heard conflicting reports about the availability of the ‘My’ namespace in C#.
   According to Microsoft, the ‘My’ functionality will only be available in VB.Net.
   According to the speaker, this is because C# does not have a background compiler running
   that can dynamically recompile the information into strongly typed classes. This statement
   was not corrected or countered by the Program Manager in charge the ‘My’ namespaces
   who was in the audience. I expect that the ‘My’ namespace will be so beneficial to
   me, that I will be creating all new projects in VB.Net, instead of C# (which I have
   been using, almost exclusively, for over 2 years).

Went walking to Chinatown for dinner tonight. We were planning on finding a restaurant that had was busy and eat there. But we took a long time to get there; everything looks different in the dark, and what is the deal with all the diagonal streets? By the time we got into Chinatown, it was late and we were hungry. Since I had decided on Cheesecake Factory last night, it was David’s turn to make the decision. We looked at 3 or 4 different restaurants. We passed by one that had a barker out front handing out menus. David decided to go into this restaurant, mostly (I think) because he couldn’t decide on any other. We walked up the stairs and got to the front desk. The maitre d’ was in a tuxedo! I looked into the restaurant and everyone was in suits and sports coats! We were in jeans and sweatshirts. But we were seated and the food was good. The restaurant was named Kan’s and it is located on Grant Street.

A restaurant with a barker and a maitre d’ in a tuxedo… Sheesh…

We had a bunch of sessions on the topic of Smart Clients. I was impressed with the way that One Click Deployment was presented, but then, most presentations are designed to impress the audience. I really think that Salem would benefit from Smart Client applications and I hope to be writing them when VS 2005 is released as beta 2 in late Spring.

I was under-whelmed, however, by the presentations on the Team software that Microsoft is releasing with Visual Studio 2005. I would have liked to see an improved updated version of Visual Source Safe. That product hasn’t been updated in at least 7 years.