Devscovery Redmond

Richter and I spent the weekend writing ASP.NET 2.0 code and loving it. After we ported a bunch of pages to ASP.NET, we looked back and marveled at how little code we had written. Jeffrey mostly worked on designing database tables and migrating code from one database to another (and coding a news aggregator algorithm for extracting news and event items from the database, computing priorities for each item, and sorting by priority), while I mostly worked on getting data from the database and rendering it into HTML. We used ASP.NET 2.0’s new data source controls wherever possible. It’s true: ASP.NET 2.0 dramatically reduces the amount of code you write. But even data source controls can’t take the pain out of dealing with heavily relational data.

Tomorrow is the first day of Devscovery Redmond. We’re pumped about kicking things off tomorrow morning, and I personally am looking forward to hearing John Robbins’ keynote. The event is being held on the Microsoft campus in the (relatively) new Executive Briefing Center in Building 33. I’ve done talks there many times before and like the venue a lot.

I strolled the halls of Buildings 41 and 42 today and bumped into Matt Pietrek. Last time I saw Matt (I think) was a couple of years ago in London. Seems like half the “names” in the industry now work for Microsoft. MS has taken advantage of the slow economy to grab some top-notch technical people. Don Box was one of the first to make the move, and many have followed in his footsteps since.

Gotta get to bed now, because Devscovery speakers have been instucted to report for duty at 7:15 a.m. Sara Faatz is SUCH a slavedriver… 🙂