CSharpStudyGroup Follow Up

  • Article

At the Atlanta C# Study Group last night, there were a few discussions that I couldn't help but chime in on.  Granted, I was focused on getting my expense report done for the month, but a couple topics were discussed that I wanted to post follow-up content for.

  • Developers see SOAP as "Simple OBJECT Access Protocol".  That is, instead of thinking about messages, people still see web services as a simplified RPC mechanism.  I love what Christian had to say about this.  Sure, Christian, blame it on the tools.
  • Michael Earls did a really cool demo of creating a generic add-in programming model.  While there have been a number of articles on plug-in frameworks before, and the demo was fairly similar to what is found in the Exception Management Application Block, the cool part was that he used the SoapEnvelope type from WSE 2.0 as the message store.  He was able to augment the message using headers, and you can conceive some of the cool stuff that is possible with this model given the capabilities of WSE 2.0.
  • For those who hadn't heard, TryParse was added to the value types in version 2.0 of the .NET Framework.  TryParse is available in 1.0 and 1.1 versions of the framework on the Double method (double.TryParse), but is added to the other value types as well.
  • There was discussion around the C# keywords "as" and "is" as well as casting.  You can use "as" to test if a type is another type and it will return null instead of throwing an exception.  Using "is" tests if the type is supported, but likely requires a secondary cast to access the type (as shown in the examples for each).

What a great group the Atlanta C# Study Group is.  The attendance was low and the people who attended it were obviously very proficient in C#, yielding some of the best geek-out discussion on programming that I have had in awhile.  Highly recommended for those in the Atlanta area, even worth a drive in from out of town.