.Net Jonesie - March, 2007

USA Trip - Highlights and Lowlights by Peter

Highlight: Utah - most any part of Utah is stunning and truly awesome. The desert is beautiful and quite unique to a Kiwi - we don't really have any deserts here. Bryce, Glen Canyon and Zion National Parks are very pretty but I wouldn't want to be there in busy season.

Lowlight: Las Vegas. It takes about 1 hour to realise what a scummy place it really is. On the outside it looks interesting but as soon as you walk into any of the hotels on the strip they all look identical - full of sad pathetic losers glued to brain washing machines. I just hate all casinos...

Highlight: The people are friendly and actually quite normal!

Highlight: Apart from Seattle the weather was clear and hot - which is apparently unusual for March.

Lowlight: San Francisco - I feel violated! For a big city it's not bad but we had a hotel in a very seedy part of town and we were constantly pestered by street bums, beggars and people trying to sell stuff. Waiting in line for a cable car we were hassled by 'entertainers' and beggars - not my idea of a great time.

Highlight: Seattle - despite the weather I like Seattle. It has a nice feel to it despite having it's fair share of street people. I didn't feel as taken advantage of as I did in San Francisco. The pace seems more relaxed there too.

Lowlight: Grand Canyon. From the air this is breath taking but like most of the USA, it takes more time to absorb than most people have in a life time. We only had 2 hours to spend looking over the edge but I felt it was too commercially exploited compared to Bryce or Glen Canyon.

Lowhighlight: It's not that expensive. It's a lot cheaper than Europe or the UK for a holiday and certainly very easy to get around.

Highlight: Driving in the USA is a joy. The roads in Utah, Nevada and Arizona are long, wide, mostly straight and not too busy. We drove about 1100 miles from Salt Lake City to Las Vegas in 6 days. Our biggest trip was about 450 miles on the first day which was a very leisurely 8 hour drive. Sticking to the wrong side of the road was a lot easier than I thought it would be.

We spent most of our time in the Utah desert so overall, it was very happy experience - the lowlights of Las Vegas & San Francisco where very minor in comparison. We are thinking about Vancouver and/or Colorado for the next trip - once we pay for this one.

Wednesday, March 28, 2007 9:51:16 PM (New Zealand Standard Time, UTC+12:00)

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MVP Summit Tidbits by Peter

I’m a little late blogging about the MVP Summit – it finished on the 15^th – but I’ve only arrived home yesterday. The wife and I took the opportunity to do some tripping around – more on this later.

The Summit this year was great. It was very well organized, the venue’s – Seattle’s Convention Center & Microsoft – were spacious and accessible. Transportation was very easy and well organized this time.

As usual, we also got to here from some great & famous speakers, including: Bill Gates, Anders Hejlsberg & Scott Guthrie – all of which were highlights in one way or another. We also got to learn about a few upcoming products and new releases – much of which I cannot repeat here – but here’s a few teasers.

Orcas – there are a lot of nice new features and enhancements in this – particularly around testing, Javascript, AJAX, design etc. Debugging and development Javascript is a place I am very keen to see enhancements on and we saw some nice demos of improvements in these areas (including a fix for a long running complaint from many people). I think the March CTP has some or all of these features included already so check it out.
ASP.Net v Next – Scott talked about and demo’d a few new features of the next version of ASP.Net in Orcas. Again, I think this stuff is probably in the March CTP but without looking I’m not willing to risk the lawyers! Lets just say that you will see more code-less provider model type things a some new controls that will save you a LOT of coding.
LINQ – Anders did a great demo of LINQ for Objects & SQL. If you have been living in a cave and not heard of LINQ or have been ignoring it then RUN – don’t walk – to your nearest search engine and learn as much as you can about it now! LINQ will change the way you work with objects and data in ways you may not have realized… eg PLINQ.
AJAX – Scott demoed some of the new Orcas features for AJAX. He also detailed some features of the current release I was unaware of, including pageLoad(). There’s a great blog post here that shows how to use this and some other nifty features.
Team System – Rosario is the code name for VSTS after Orcas. There’s not much public information on this so I can’t say anything but the very few tidbits I did here about it sounds intriguing. Use your imagination and look at some of the research and tools the team has been talking about and you will get a fair idea of where they are heading.
Lastly, some estimated delivery schedules were mentioned for Orcas & Longhorn… and I’m certainly not going to repeat those but it’s safe to say – I think – that by this time next year I’ll be blogging about Orcas SP1 :]

Monday, March 26, 2007 8:55:14 PM (New Zealand Standard Time, UTC+12:00)

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