JCooney.NET

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I gave a presentation on Thursday evening at the Gold Coast .NET SIG on code generation in .NET. The presentation went reasonably well. It was good that it even happened at all - I left at 4:00 PM for what (under normal traffic conditions) should have been a 1 hr drive, the presentation was supposed to start at 6:30. At 5:15 I had progressed perhaps 1/10th of the journey in traffic conditions that at best could be described as abysmal. The 3 lanes in the direction I was going were totally gridlocked. My favourite moment of the whole trip was when after the gridlock had passed the car directly in front of me slowed, and finally stopped. The driver then put on the hazard lights and proceeded to get out and push the car from the centre lane into the narrow verge between the lane and a concrete wall while traffic whizzed past him. Poor guy. If I had not been insanely late I would have helped. I finally arrived at 6:20~ish and raced around like a mad-man until I found the room I was presenting in. The presentation seemed to go OK, all my demos worked and I even squeezed in an ad-hoc code demo based on a question from the audience.

I’m still struggling a little when it comes to presenting larger code samples, I think the best thing to do is what Dominic did in his recent generics presentation - Don’t do big pre-written code samples, do it all on the fly, however while you can do this to demonstrate language features it can be hard to do in other instances. One pattern that I have seen from watching other presenters is that some run the demo before they show the code. This is presumably to give the audience some idea of what to expect when they “walk through” the code (which they do after the code is run). It seems to work as a presentation techinque, but I still struggle in the “walk through” - how much detail is too much?

In other news I now officially have GMail envy. Somebody I know has GMail. They have described it in some detail to me, using prases like “the best web application I have ever seen” and “I hate to use the word ‘perfect’ but I can’t think of a better way to describe it” and “It feels local” and “It’s rich, but lite!”. Wow. I want it. I also want to know all about the back end technology.

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XSLT debugging is getting tantalizingly close (see image below). Yes, that button tool-tip DOES say “debug” and that IS a break-point in the left-hand margin. The only problem is that when I press said button I get a XmlQueryException, with an inner NullReferenceException. Is anybody else having these problems debugging XSLT in the Tech-Ed CTP release of Whidbey, or is it just me? The transform does produce valid output (when I click the “show XSL output” to the left I see the output in TestFile1.xml). I might try and create a compiled xslt with a .pdb file and see if I can debug it that way.

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I noticed a link on Dare Obasanjo’s weblog to a site called IT Conversations. It is kind of like what DotNetRocks would be like if it wasn’t run by a bunch of young hooligans. The shows are more generally IT focused (not just .NET), but I have listened to an interview with the creator of PHP Rasmus Lerdorf and an interview with Steve McConnell thus far and both have been quite good. They have not made me laugh so hard Red Bull nearly came out my nose like DotNetRocks has done a couple of times, but when you share a workspace with others this is a good thing.

In other news the download total for my GotDotNet samples marches on towards 8K. I’ll have to finish off that XPath syntax hilighting before it gets to 10.

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XML MVP and avid bath-reader Daniel Cazzulino has written a cool article on the MSDN about customizing generated code by manipulating CodeDom object graphs when creating a “custom class” from an XML Schema (these object graphs are generated by the same framework classes that are used by xsd.exe when you give it the /classes command line switch). If this sounds somewhat similar to the CodeDom object graph manipulations that I was doing in my recent typed dataset sample then it should. »

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A co-worker sent me a link to a very funny site. Is has handy tips on hardware-related items such as how to de-fraggle the motherdisc and how to remove your graphics card without invalidating your warranty. Great stuff for non-hardware people like me. »