Welcome Nigel and Richard

Today Nigel Spencer and Richard Hollon joined us at ABB.

Timothy has dubbed us the “Dream Team”. I’m not sure if that means we’re really good, or we’re really sleepy.

Passed 70-562

I’ve received confirmation that I passed Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, ASP.NET Application Development. This was one of the two beta exams I did in early May.

The one good thing about doing beta exams is they are free. The bad thing is that unlike regular exams, you have to wait 6-8 weeks to find out if you passed or not, and you don’t get a score – just a pass or fail.

CodeCampSA 2008 – Day 2

Presentation notes

Paul Stovell – Reactive Programming

• Reactive programming. cf. Excel
• Data binding – similar for .NET
• Manipulating the flow
  • WPF ValueConverters
  • EditableAdapter class
• Reactive Domain Models
  • Search query generic class
• Bindable LINQ
  • A bit like SqlCacheDependency for LINQ expressions
  • Very cool!
  • Just add one method to LINQ and you’re done

Tatham Oddie - ASP.NET MVC

• The “I” in URI is for Indicator
• Controller – adds data to ViewData dictionary
• Html.ActionLink (Html helper class)
• Routes – more than just URL rewriting
• System.Web.Routing – can also be used in WebForms
• View Engines – WebForms, but can also use others

• IoC

• RegisterControllers – extension method for WindsorContainer class

Ben Mackie – Reflection, extension, injection

• Three types of projects

• Configuration
• Extension

• Purpose-built

• SPI – service provider interface – how the host depends on the extension
• Castle configuration – can pass references to other dependencies through the config

• System.AddIn

• Contracts, views and adapters

I wonder if you could write a whole application as a bunch of addins?

Dr Greg Low – SQL isolation levels etc

How much one user impacts others.

• Read committed (shared lock, SQL default)
• Read uncommitted (no locks, risky) – consider using a read-only partition on a table instead
• Repeatable read (locks, but can have phantom rows)
• Serializable (locks, no phantoms) – very consistent
• Snapshot (2005+, writers not blocked, uses row versioning)

Locks

• Shared (S)
• Updated (U)
• Exclusive (X)
• Intent
• Schema
• Bulk update (Bu)

Make sure you use semicolons in your T-SQL as it will become mandatory in the future

• Hints – use as a last resort
• Use new DMVs to find blocking queries

• Deadlocks

• who ever did the least work gets killed (different from earlier versions)
• Use deadlock graph (lock events) in SQL profiler
• Make use of TRY/CATCH (2005+)
• Build deadlock handling into client app from day one

Shane Morris – User Experience (UX)

UX design process

• Information design
• Interaction design
• Presentation design

Interaction and presentation are mostly in the “coding” side.

Interaction design

1. List everything you need to show
2. Map out the workflow – what order are people going to work?
3. Layout the elements (left-right, top-bottom)
4. Check groupings

Presentation design

1. Remove every unnecessary element
2. ?
3. Line stuff up – line up text to baselines (eg. labels and textboxes)
4. Space and size things evenly
5. Indicate grouping (group-boxes, similarity, proximity, alignment, empty space)
6. Add visual weight

• Colour
• Size
• Contrast
• Irregular shape
• Misalignment
• 3D
• Movement

Daniel Brown – SharePoint development

New Visual Studio 2008 extensions for SharePoint.

Corneliu Tusnea – Debugging the CLR

Debugging in Visual Studio

• Use the Debugger attributes

• DebuggerDisplayAttribute

• DebuggerBrowseableAttribute

• Use object ID to attach to objects in the watch window

Memory dumps

WinDbg

• .loadby sos mscorwks
• !threads (list threads)
• !pe xxxxx (print exception)
• !do xxxxx (dump object)
• !dso (dump stack objects)
• !iptomd xxxx (map instruction pointer to memory dump)
• !dumpmt xxxx (dump method table)

gflags  - use to start debugger before service starts

Adrian Downs – PerformancePoint

Demonstration of Dashboard Designer

Final day thoughts

Another great day of content. I had to leave before Paul’s second quiz was finished (apparently the SMS proved problematic and they had to resort to paper in the end). Maybe next time the quiz could be run over the whole day (eg. a question in between each session). This would give time for answers to be received.

Well done to Peter for organising everything, and special thanks to the interstate speakers for making the effort to come down to Adelaide – very much appreciated.