The DevDays DVD
I finally got around to checking out the DevDays DVD today... wow! This disc alone is worth the price of admission. Each of the sessions is availbe in video form, with a synchronized “agenda” that lets you easily jump around to various topics. You can also pull up the PowerPoint slides locally to follow along. And did I mention the complete, very well-documented, source code? These guys are good.
Apparently, all of the sessions were designed and written by Vertigo Software. These are some sharp guys (and gals). I saw their CEO, Scott Stanfield, speak at TechEd 2003, and he was great. Up there with Scott Guthrie for best of show. It's funny, because when I first started reading Scott Hanselman's blog, I thought he was Scott Stanfield. You see, Scott Hanselman is ALSO a great speaker on .NET technologies. I haven't seen him speak in person, but I've seen the movie. As it turns out, there are actually 3 distinct people named Scott that are really worth listening to if you get the chance. As luck would have it, they've all been guests on .NET Rocks, so you DO have a chance.
Anyway, I was saying, the presentations on the disc are really worthwhile. One of the speakers at DevDays - Austin commented on how all the presentations were pre-written, which put the speakers in a rare situation where they had to present material that they didn't create. I can understand how tough that would be, since we all have our own personal coding styles, and you would be up there in front of an audience promoting someone ELSE's coding style, while constantly fighting back the urge to say "actually, I would have done it THIS way". To their credit, I only heard that phrase 2 or 3 times.
Speaking of coding styles and the DevDays code: I couldn't help noticing the use of "type prefixes" in some of the code - a la Hungarian notation. A practice specifically discouraged in the .NET design guidelines. Actually, the prefixes were only used in a few places, and it is a practice I am guilty of myself. For example, the DataAdapters are named daIssues, daIssueTypes, etc. And the UI components are named txtUsername, txtPassword, etc. I recently worked on creating a C# Coding Standards document at work, and we added an explicit exception to the “no type prefixes“ rule for UI components. Is that normal, or are we all just a little weak willed about breaking the habit? Do you still use type prefixes ever in your .NET code?
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