Dave Donaldson

I attended the Fall 2004 MSDN Event series today in Columbus. I must say that I'm wholly disappointed and really expected much more in the session. This post is going to explain my reasoning.

First off, I consider myself an intermediate to advanced .NET developer. Therefore, below is what I expected for each talk and what was actually talked about:

OOP in VB.NET

Expectation: A high-level beginner's presentation about some OO concepts with code to show how you to do it in VB.NET.

Actual Talk: I was basically dead on. It didn't bother me to sit through the talk, but I was kind of hoping to maybe extract a nugget or two that I could use somewhere. Didn't happen. Although, I will give props to the presenter for trying to explain OO refactoring in 15 minutes with a couple demos.

MapPoint Web Services

Expectation: An overview of MapPoint and how to take advantage of some of the web services it provides. I also expected a nice demo.

Actual Talk: Again, I was right on. The only problem is that most of the audience wasn't really into the topic, so the speaker glazed over it very quickly (in about 15 minutes). What he did show looked cool, so I'll probably end up playing with it.

Optimizing ASP.NET 1.1 Application

Expectation: A somewhat advanced discussion about optimization techniques for ASP.NET. I figured I would see some caching techniques, stuff to speed up data access calls, tricks with ViewState, and custom performance counters.

Actual Talk: This was the most disappointing part of the session; very bland and not very informative. There were only 2 things talked about: the ACT tool and creating custom performance counters. Having used ACT since it was codenamed Homer a few years ago, this wasn't too useful for me, although by show of hands most people in the audience hadn't used it. The performance counter stuff was nice as I learned a couple tidbits in creating custom perf counters. However, ACT dominated the talk. ACT is not a tool to optimize ASP.NET apps. It's used to begin identifying possible places in your application where performance might suffer, but that's it. And it's certainly not a replacement for something like LoadRunner. The word caching wasn't even mentioned during this talk. How do you present anything on optimizing ASP.NET apps without a discussion of caching? I consider optimizing the performance of a web application to be a somewhat advanced topic, but this wasn't it. Heck, not a single optimization technique was shown.

ASP.NET 2.0 Membership and Personalization

Expectation: An overview of the new stuff and how/where it helps developers. I also figured to see a cool demo.

Actual Talk: To be honest, I had to leave toward the end of this talk. It was the last talk of the session and I had to go so my wife could get to work (and give me the kids). But what I did see was pretty decent. I haven't played much with the membership and personalization stuff in ASP.NET 2.0 yet, so most of the talk was fairly informative. If a demo was shown, I didn't get to see it.

How to Fix It

OK, so instead of me just complaining, I would like to offer some suggestions for improving these sessions:

1. Give each talk in the session a level number. 100 for beginner, 200 for intermediate, 300 for advanced. That way, I know to not show up to the OO in VB.NET talk if I don't want to.
2. Give each talk a “depth perception“. Is it an overview, an in-depth talk, or a mix (brief overview followed by in-depth)? I prefer in-depth stuff, so I'd like to know this going in.
3. Put the order of the talks from beginner to advanced. I felt it was actually this way today, but wanted to point that out. This way I know I could skip the 2 beginner talks at the start of the session and attend the 2 advanced talks after that.

So all that being said, even though the half-day session was completely free (along with a nice DVD, t-shirt, and complimentary beverage/popcorn), I expected quite a bit more. My take on these events is two-fold: to get some insight into existing technology and to get jazzed about the upcoming versions. I felt this kind of fell flat in both respects.

Now that Rory is a DCC (Developer Community Champion), maybe he'll take this feedback and pass it on.