Just got back from Code Camp 12 in Waltham, MA!
It was great! This was my first code camp, and I LOVED IT! It was at the Microsoft office in Waltham, MA, just outside the Boston area.
A big thanks to all who presented, and to those who organized!
Here are the sessions I attended:
- John Bowen: Visual Studio 2010 features
- Joseph Hill: Mono and .NET developers
- Phil Denoncourt: Localization and Globalization
- Julia Lerman: Entity Framework POCO
- Michael Cummings: ASP.NET MVC Better Practices
- Milan Negovan: The Microsoft AJAX JavaScript library
- Joseph Anderson: E-Commerce with .NET
All the presentations were great, but I bolded the two speakers whose presentations were particularly enlightening for me.
Julie’s presentation was great because I personally and professionally use the Entity Framework, and find it to be a good fit for most of my needs. I usually use it for rapid application development and I find it useful because it’s free, it’s integrated into Visual Studio and it’s fairly simple.
People say the current version of the Entity Framework does have shortcomings, but I personally haven’t run into any of the problem scenarios. However, the new version, Entity Framework 4, is going to be released with .NET 4 and is supposed to add a lot of features that people have been asking for! One of those features is the ability to use POCO’s with the Entity Framework.
Currently, the classes that are generated by the Entity Framework’s designer are coupled with the API. This has a number of implications, one of which is limited testability. This is where POCO comes in. POCO stands for Plain Old CLR Object. Basically, a POCO is an object that does not have external dependencies. So when you are able to use POCO’s with the Entity Framework, you will be decoupling your classes. There are also some other great features in Entity Framework 4, so go check it out!
Phil’s presentation on Localization was great because I am about to completely localize a web application for a friend. To be honest, I didn’t know a whole lot about how localization works in .NET. As I’ve worked with many CMS’ before, I vaguely knew about resource files and about the Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture property. However, I didn’t know about all the built-in localization features that the .NET framework has. Think about it! With localization in .NET you have to worry about localized content in Master pages, pages, user controls, databases, JavaScript, and more! There are also some gotchas that are good to know before even starting the localization process. Maybe I will talk to Phil and see if I can re-post or re-link the slides he used for his presentation!
I’ll try update this post later with more detail about the sessions if I have more time. Maybe I can link some of the content too.