"Heroes Happen Here" Notes part 2

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(archived from my old blog from my pre-MS days)

Yes, I know.  I have a weird definition of "tomorrow."  Here are my notes from last Thursday's HHH event in Harrisburg, PA:

Session 2: Office Development

Zhiming Xue https://blogs.msdn.com/zxue

Talked a bit bout how VSTO isn't an extra in VS 2008, but that it's built in. 

One thing I noticed about each of the presenters - they need to discover the Consolas font!  Scott Guthrie uses it, should be good enough for these guys.

He had an interesting use of template expansion.  Before the demo he created some snippets and bound them to keywords inVS (like you do with "ctor" to expand a constructor).  So he'd type something like snip1, then "tab" and get his snippet inserted.  I don't think I've seen that one before, but maybe I'm behind on the power curve.

I noticed that he spent a good while demoing the "auto include imports/using" feature, which has been in VS for three years now.

Showed using WPF inside an office Panel in word, which was cool.  It took me awhile to realize that it WAS WPF - just goes to show what we "expect" from software nowadays.

Session 3: WPF & C++ (huh?)

This session surprised me.  I really liked the first half-hour.  Not the most authoritative speaker, I could almost feel the BS oozing.  Yes, WPF can do some 3D things (on Vista), but that's not its strength.  WPF isn't challenging any 3D game engines out there, yet.  But the demo was really nice.  I almost had an epiphany... almost.  But I'm still not sure where I'd use WPF in a LoB app.  I had a similar experience but GOT the epiphany back at Tech Ed 97, where I finally understood how the Web could be used as an application platform (there really weren't too many of them around back in early 97).

The last half-hour was a total waste.  Completely unconnected to WPF, the speaker began on new features of C++ in VS 2008.  At least I think they were new features.  I haven't used C++ in about 10 years or so I can't really say.  Another famous quote from 97 Tech Ed (from Don Box), "I used to code in C++, but then I had a family and had to go home at night."

 

So that's about it.  There were supposed to be four sessions but one was either combined with the others or just left out (a little confusing).  It was supposed to be about SOwhAt (my term for SOA), but I guess it just didn't happen.  I don't have anything against web services, but I just don't see the big advantage of WCF and w-death-*.