Last week at our Chapel
Hill Bloggers Meetup, Roy Kim gave us a demonstration of his tabulas.com
online service and community. This is a project Roy starting two years ago as
a way to share online journals with a few of his friends. He still refers to it as
a little network of bloggers. Ya, little, he currently has almost 57,000 registered
users. Roy has built a great site with many features that large, heavily funded
sites do not have. What does Roy say has contributed most to his success? Adding features
users want. I think sites like Microsoft Spaces could learn a lot from his approach!
Great job Roy!
Code Camp III: Boston
This weekend I had a wonderful time at the Code Camp III event organized by Thom Robins
in Boston. I traveled up to get some ideas for our Code Camp being held in Raleigh,
NC on Saturday April 9, and to give a presentation on developing Tabled PC software.
I had a lot of fun preparing for my session which I am also going to be presenting
in Raleigh and at the Atlanta Code Camp in May. Attendance for my session which was
in the first time slot Sunday morning was a little lower than I had hoped, but since
it snowed all day Saturday we were happy that the event was able to continue on Sunday.
(I don’t expect snow to be an issue at my next events)
The entire event was excellent. Thom and has helpers did a fantastic job of organizing
and hosting the event. I think attendance for the two days was over 500 people. I
enjoyed talking to a wide variety of people on an even wider variety of topics. There
were a wide variety of speakers including some well known speakers, and some not some
well knowns that had equally good, and at times even better real world information
to share.
Martin Shoemaker presented two other sessions relating to the Tablet PC that were
very enjoyable. Martin has done some great work with tablets on things like his TabletUML
software. Martin definitely sparked some ideas for me that I hope to reciprocate back
in the future.
Raj Das shared some great information on work he has been doing in Smart Client development.
I’m hoping to convince him to join us at the Raleigh Code Camp in April.
Saturday night we were able to meet up with some of the speakers in the hotel lounge
for some continued conversations. I really enjoyed seeing Don Demsak (DonXML) again
(And thanks for the ride!) as well is having an opportunity to talk with Julie Lerman.
If you have never been to a Code Camp event, I strongly encourage you to attend an
event in your area, or make your way to one away from home. They are a great mix of
sharing of ideas, insights, and how-to’s mixed with incredibly valuable networking
with others in the .Net development community. It’s value truly comes from being presented
by the community to the community.
TRINUG – Special Event Guest Speaker Brad Abrams
Tonight, Wednesday March 2,
the Triangle Dot Net User Group is holding a special
meeting to hear Brad Abrams, Lead Program Manager, Common Language Runtime Team
speak. If you’re anywhere in the area and do anythign with .Net, this is a must
attend event! Ok, now go tell a friend.
Effective .NET Framework based development: Exception Handling
and Memory Management
by Brad Abrams
Effective .NET Framework based development: Exception Handing and Memory Management
5:45-7:15pm: This talk will drill demystify two areas that cause many problems for
C# and VB.NET developers. Correctly handling errors via exceptions and recovering
gracefully when they occur is a deceptively simple problem. We will discuss time-tested
guidelines for raising and handling exceptions and discuss changes for the soon to
be release .NET Framework 2.0 product. The second topic is how to effectively deal
with memory management in the CLR. We will take a look at how the automatic memory
manager in the CLR really works and why it works that way and discuss best practices
for writing code in that world. We will also touch on some new features coming in
.NET Framework 2.0 in this area.