A big thanks to Doug and all the speakers for putting on a very enjoyable and informative DevDays 2004 in Durham, NC.

Some of the key points that made it into my notes are:

• Security – Care about, learn about it, deal with it
  Service Pack 2 – Be ready for it. See the “Windows XP Service Pack 2 – Security Information for Developers document on MSDN
• Use stored procedures! At the very least, used parameterized queries. Dynamic SQL statements can be very, very bad. SPs are secure, fast, and easy to maintain.
• Strongly Name your assemblies – Versioning doesn’t work unless the assemblies are strongly named.
• Smart Clients – As defined by Todd Fine : “The best of thick and thin clients”
• Auto updating apps are super cool. Todd did a great demo of using MSI to deploy an application once and keep it updating automagically Check out the AppUpdater component
• Issue Vision, a sample source code application distributed at the event has some great smart client example code for handling semi-connected data access, threading, and much more.

The crowd was very excited by the Whidbey demos. Todd Fine and Ken Spencer did a great job of showing off some of the great new features, including many time saving shortcuts for developers. The Whitehorse modeling demos looked very slick, especially how it reacted to code changes.

Overall it was a great event that I hope continues to happen frequently. Thanks to everybody that stopped by the TRINUG user group table and said hello. On a semi-related note, Doug Turnure from Microsoft that did the opening keynote will be presenting Indigo (A must see!) at the April Triangle .Net Users Group meeting.

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