Dan Rigsby - Coding Up Style

I finished a Heroes {Community} Launch event in Indianapolis, IN for the IndyNDA users group last night. This event was setup with 2 speakers. Paul Hacker covered Windows 2008 for 20 minutes, while I covered both SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 for the remaining hour.

There were about a 120 people in attendance and the response and comments from the audience seemed positive.  IndyNDA is now in meeting a new room which can easily seat 200 people, provides tables for all in attendance to write or eat on, and has 7 projectors to display the presentation to instead of just 2.  This location is much improved and will serve the organization well in the future.

My talk over SQL Server 2008 covered:

Top 10 SQL Server 2008 Features for Developers

1. LINQ
2. Intellisense for SQL Server Management Studio: T-Sql, database objects, & parameters
3. FileStream Datatype:
• Designed to solve unstructured LOB (large object) storage, provides performance of native NTFS with transactional support. Data is stored in NTFS, and SQL Server manages relationship between the columns and files. SQL Server manages the transactional integrity such as backing up and restoring data.
4. Date & Time Datatypes: Separate data and time types. Time can now go down to hh:mm:ss[.nnnnnnn]
5. DateTime2 & DateTimeOffset Datatypes: Supports years 0001 to 9999 (much like in .Net); DateTimeOffset is timezone aware, but not daylight savings time!
6. Hierachical Datatype: Allows storage of hierarchical data such as org charts, etc.
• Only 1 root per table though
7. Spatial Datatypes:
• Geography: Uses a geodetic (round earth) model and stores points, lines, polygons, and collections of Latitude & Longitude coordinates.
• Geometry: Uses a planar (flat earth) model which stores the same types of data, but is used primarily for navigation and mapping.
8. T-SQL MERGE Statement: Allows merging of rows from multiple tables. You can choose to update matched rows, insert unmatched rows, or delete unmatched rows from the primary table.
9. Table-Valued Parameters: Tables can be passed as parameters to sprocs.
10. Data Change Tracking
• Change Data Capture (CDC): This allows you to capture all changes to data in a table into a tracking table.
• Change Data Tracker (CDT): This similar to CDC, but it doesn’t actually capture the changes made, but captures only that some change was made.

The SQL Server 2008 demonstrations included a series of scripts which created a database, turned on CDC , showed off CDC , and created a table.  The table was an Employee table that used some of the new DateTime types, hierachyId as a make-shirt org chart, and a geography field to represent the employee’s location as a latitude and longitude.  I then ran a series of queries to show how you can search the hierachyId and the CDC history.

My talk over Visual Studio 2008 covered:

1. What are the features in Visual Studio itself targeted to different types of developers: All, Windows Client, Web Client, Office, Mobile, and Server.  I went into highlights in each one of these that people may or may not know about.

The Visual Studio 2008 demonstrations included: 

1. New project properties
2. UAC support in application manifests
3. Refactoring support for "Using" statements
4. Wpf Editor
5. New Css Support in web projects
6. New Web Designer
7. Javascript Intellisense
8. Javascript Debugging
9. WcfSvcHost and WcfTestClient
10. "Add Service Reference" window and its advanced options

Overall, I think my presentation went pretty well.  We had some issues with the microphones and I ended up having to do the entire presentation with a handheld microphone.  This made it very hard to do code demos and talk at the same time.  I only have 2 hands.  So there were quite a few more "silent moments" than I would have liked, but I kept each of them around 5 seconds so that I didn’t isolate the audience.

Here is the entire presentation including slides, before and after projects, code snippets, notes, etc.: http://www.danrigsby.com/files/Presentations/HeroesCommunityLaunch-Indianapolis1.zip

Part 2 of this event will occur on May 8th, 2008 at the same location (see speaking engagements).  This meeting will continue on with the Visual Studio 2008 launch, but will really be focused for .Net developers.  Topics will include new language features in C# 3.0 and VB 9.0 and .Net Framework additions such as those added to Wcf, WF, System.Addin, etc.