Developing For .NET

Tonight I am visiting RVNUG (Roanoke Valley Dot Net Users Group) for the first time. Kathleen Dollard, a columnist for Visual Studio Magazine and author of Code Generation in Microsoft .NET (which I have and have read most of) is the featured presenter. She will be discussing “Refactoring with Generics”. How to make your code better with Generics, using Framework Generics, and how to use and make your own Generics.

Here are some bullets I garnered from the presentation:

• Find out about the Converter<T> Generic Delegate.
• “Team Test” is now part of VS2008.
• Anonymous Delegates employ “Closure” – allows a private variable to be trucked off to (captured by) an out of scope method (like an anonymous delegate)
• Return a LINQ list immediately by using “.ToList()”: no deferred execution
• Format for declaring my own generics and specifying Type inheritance: public class GenericClass<TData, TCollection> : SomeBase where TCollection : List<TData> where TData : class

Conclusions

Overall, a good presentation. Unfortunately, it is a little dated when you consider all the new technologies out there. Kathleen did include some optional approaches using LINQ and Lambdas, but the bulk of the material is still 2.0 based. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying I didn’t learn anything because I did. I think I have a much better handle on creating my own generic classes now. But I think the target audience for this presentation should be developers moving from 1.1 to 2.0 or new developers.

Now for the scary part: the topic is very relevant. There are still an incredible number of people developing in pre-2.0 technologies who need this kind of information.

Kathleen is great: if you ever get a chance to go to a presentation of hers, by all means treat yourself: she really knows her stuff. We had a nice talk during dinner about the future of LINQ to SQL, OR/M, the Entity Data Model, and other Framework issues.? She was very patient with my questions and her answers reveal that she is one smart cookie.