I'm late blogging about this, but I'll be speaking at the C# User Group of Greater Boston tomorrow night (November 1st). The meeting starts at 6:30 at Microsoft's Waltham office. Here is the session description:
Avoiding C# Traps and Pitfalls
As any developer knows, there's always more than one way to solve a coding problem. This is certainly true when using .NET and C#, but some approaches are better than others. For example, you probably know to use the Length property to check that a string is empty or that you should use StringBuilder when concatenating many strings. In this talk, we'll go beyond those basics to cover the "gotcha's" lurking in the shadows of C# and the .NET Framework. You'll see plenty of example code showing practices to avoid and your options for avoiding them. Every developer should know about these, but unfortunately, many find out after the fact. This is a good chance to learn from other developers' pains and immediately use these tips to make your applications better.
Hope to see you there!
-Chris
The Patterns & Practices team at Microsoft are a very busy bunch and it can be difficult to keep up with what they're working on. To help get the word out, Ron Jacobs, Tom Hollander, Eugenio Pace and Don Smith yesterday conducted the first of what will be quarterly "What are we up to?" webcasts.
You can now view the webcast at your leisure by visiting http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-us&EventID=1032282437&CountryCode=US
Some nuggets of information from the webcast include the Enterprise Library 2.0 status:
- The current CTP (August) is available from http://practices.gotdotnet.com/projects/entlib
- It runs with VS2005 Beta 2, but not currently wit the later RC builds
- It is missing a few key features and is good for prototyping, but is not recommended for production purposes
- Next release slated to coincide with the November 7th VS2005 launch.
- Expected to be a feature-complete "high-quality preview" release
- Full, final release planned for one month later (early December)
Keep your eyes out for other interesting projects like the Line-of-Business Application Toolkit (expected Mid-2006) and the Web User Interface Process application block. I'm especially interested in the WUIP because it is an updated web-app-only version of the UIP block intended to address the need for web applications to support Model/View/Controller (MVC) pattern. P&P have also indicated it may be based on the Windows Workflow Foundation, recently announced at PDC.
Good stuff! Keep it coming, guys!
-Chris