I finished another Heroes {Community} Launch event last night in Ft. Wayne, IN for the .Net Users of Ft. Wayne (nufw).  I volunteered to speak up here because my in-laws live in Ft. Wayne, and I figured it would be nice to give my wife and daughter the chance to visit with them while I was speaking. I have had this event planned for a couple of months, but I knew it would be hard to do an entire launch event in just one night.  Fortunately, they were really only interested in Visual Studio, but it was still difficult to squeeze everything into one event. The major areas of discussion were:

Visual Studio 2008

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.
2. New project properties
3. UAC support in application manifests
4. New Css Support in web projects
5. New Web Designer
6. Javascript Intellisense
7. Javascript Debugging

Languages

• Type Inference
• Anonymous types
• Extension Methods
• Object & Collection Initializers
• Lambda expressions
• Automatic properties
• Partial methods
• Support for LINQ
• Query Keywords
• XML Literals (VB only)
• Ternary operator to replace IIF (VB only)

.Net Framework

• Additions to .Net 3.0 features (WCF, WF, WPF, Cardspace)
• Additions to Windows Forms
• Additions to ASP.Net
• System.Addin
• Additions to CLR (HashSet, ReaderWriterLockSlim, DataTimeOffset, TimeZoneInfo, etc)
• Expression Trees

Overall, I think my presentation went pretty well.  We started a bit late since we had to wait an extra half hour for the pizza to arrive.  It would be hard to hold a 2 hour meeting with a bunch of hungry developers.  The meeting was held in a small conference room at local company. We had 30 people attend which was one of the highest attended events that NUFW has ever put on, but meant that the room was very crowded.  We had to bring in seats to fit everyone, and I was forced to have some attendees sit behind me which was a bit uncomfortable.

I really enjoyed presenting there, and I hope they invite me back again in the future.   Unfortunately though, they didn’t provide questionnaires to the attendees.  So if anyone who attended this event is reading this, please provide any feedback (both good and bad) either as a comment to this post or directly to me.  I would like to know what I am doing well and what I could do better, but I hope everyone enjoyed the presentation.

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