It's been an exceptional day for me with Kathleen Dollard as a primary focal point. Her brand new DotNetRocks show I listened to during the day while running errands and a Kathleen Dollard Double Bill at tonight's VTDotNet meeting made this a high input day of .NET discovery. She is SOOO knowledgeable and is such an excellent presenter. But the best part? She can talk at twice the speed of a normal human being! Fantastic!
Some of the things that immediately come to mind in considering what I learned from Kathleen today:
- Generics change everything. When considering using Systems.Collections, move straight to Systems.Collections.Generics
- Code Gen - Database metamorphose layer. What a CodeGen rube I am not to have given that concept serious thought.
- More Code Gen - Use hashing (checksum) to prevent overwriting original code.
- Tracing in VS2005. Wow. A whole new approach to capturing application activity, and not for us as developers necessarily, but for future consumers.
- "Your code can move to 2005 right away. You'll take some time." (I'm butchering the phrase, but it made an impact.)
- VS2003 was designed for the machine, VS2005 was designed for we who use it.
And those were the things I didn't have to think about. I shouldn't have tried to make a list, as it didn't do justice to all of the good stuff I received from her today.