Couldn't sleep this morning. With the change in daylight savings time, and me travelling
one hour back, my brain thought it was
8:30AM
when it was only
6:30AM
. No biggie, I was able to connect to both my work and home email accounts and make
sure I was all caught up.
After a quick breakfast, I headed down to the lobby to catch the PDC shuttle. Guess
what? I just missed it. 15 minute wait...
Big ol' buss shows up and I get on with a few others who (I think) were speaking Portugese.
Not 100% sure, but I don't think it was Spanish. The bus dropped us off and in I went.
Checkin took about 5 minutes. They gave me tons of crap... a backpack full of crap
in fact. (I haven't really looked at it yet. More on that later tonight.)
Walked about a mile inside the LA Convention Center before I found the room for
Chris Sells' PreCon session .NET - The Smart Client Perspective. On the way
there, I was surprised to see hundreds of tables with ethernet cables on them (and
switches under them). Very cool. I also saw a bunch of 8 foot tall towers with 802.11b
WAPs on them. Again cool.
Got settled in the PreCon room and spent 5 minutes or so getting my machine up on
the wireless network. (I had it disabled because of a BSOD that happens at my office.)
Right about then Chris and Rocky got
started.
Chris is an excellent speaker and Rocky plays a good straight guy to Chris' funny
guy. They made tons of jokes about VB (Rocky is a VB guy and Chris is a C++/C# guy).
They started out with a quick introduction to WinForms. They created a WinForm by
hand (as opposed to using the Wizard). Then they explained the “scary block of code”
(the InitializeComponent method that allows the VS.NET designer to work). Showed events,
delegates, etc, etc, blah, blah, blah. I learned some interesting VB-specific details
that I was generally aware of, but didn’t really know… specifically using the Handles
keyword to hook an event handler up to an event. Interesting, but I would have to
say I’m not a big fan. I like to have all of my event hookup code in one place so
it is easy for me to find. When you use Handles, you have to scan your code looking
for event handlers (unless you are a point-and-click person, in which case there is
probably some IDE feature to help you here).
Surprisingly, Chris actually said, “I like that stuff,” in regards to the Handles
keyword. It is one of those things, like so many things in VB, that seem like such
a nice idea at first, but I really think that it will lead to a nightmarish mess in
projects of any decent size. My two cents…
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