maybe it is engineering

On the other hand...there are some "engineering" tasks involved with software development. For example when I'm building a piece of software that talks to a database, in my head or on paper, I'll calculate a few performance figures on the execution cost. I'll look at different factors such as latency, bandwidth, storage space, etc. In that sense we're engineering the solution.

Alan cooper & Alan Brown

I'm attending a keynote at VSLive where Alan Cooper and Alan Brown are talking about software management. Interesting quote from Alan Cooper, "...the title software engineer is title inflation". To me he has a very concrete perspective on software development. *Most* of us are not software engineers, we're software craftsmen. (at least I prefer to see it that way)

Borland announced thier .NET profiler named OptimizeIt today. I saw a demo of it at the Borland booth here at VSLive. I really like the real-time monitoring features. While profiling you can control the garbage collector and create deltas for instance count monitoring. Here's a link to the feature matrix.

Hollis Quote

"Smart clients are sexy"

web services vrs tcp remoting

I'm listening to Billy Hollis as he's doing his presentation on "Smart Client Architecture". He's talking about the typical n-tier design. He's also talking about the transport protocol used in this architecture. He became quite lively when he began to articulate the differences between Web Services and .NET Remoting. He pointed out many good points but the boldest were about perception: "Yea our product has Web Services but when you install it we recommend you to use Remoting because it's faster". He's cutting through the hype and is trying to deliver real world advice.

BTW - Ingo Rammer has a cool comparison on this topic.

Java 2 VB.NET

I'm checking out a VB.NET OOP session hoping to catch any programming gotchas that I should know about. At the end of the session the speaker allocated some time for questions. The interesting thing is most of the people asking questions were asking them from a Java perspective. I'm curious, are there a lot of Java programmers learning VB.NET? Seems odd to me, but in a down economy it could mean the difference between a job and no job.

BTW...It sure it odd to use +=, -=, &= and Return with VB.NET

VSLive day 2

I just sat through Keith Pleas' session on the .NET build process. He talked about options like strong naming, GAC, and native image generation.

At this year's conference I've been noticing a lot of excitement around "Smart Clients". It seems like the method of deploying WinForms clients from a web server is gaining momentum. I think this is great. There are many advantages to this deployment model and very few drawbacks. In it's current state the security features built around .NET is very robust. For example administrators can define for the enterprise what managed code can do based on where it comes from. One instance of this is to deny code the right to execute on the user's machine except for code that's delivered through the intranet.

vslive

I'm blogging from the VSLive pre-conference workshop. It's Brian Randell and Ken Getz's "Build a Rich Client App with Visual Basic .NET". We just went through the Deployment and Versioning presentation. It was helpful to me to hear somebody lay it out in bite sized chunks. Brian talked about strong names, GAC, and codebase references. I see knowing this area critical for anyone who wants to be an effective .NET programmer.

Back to the workshop....