r2 musings - rants, raves, and research (mostly on .NET topics) from rik robinson

This past weekend a few of us Wintellectuals made the trek Atlanta to Murfreesboro TN to present at the annual devLink conference.  I really can't say enough about the level of professionalism and obvious preparation that went into devLink.  John Kellar, Tommy Norman, and Leanna Baker and the entire team that made it happen are well deserving of accolades for their accomplishment.  The conference was held on the campus of Middle Tennessee State University which was also perfectly suited for the task.  All of the rooms were nice, large, and well-equipped (even though said equipment was apparently timed to shut off exactly at the 1-1/2 presentation mark).  As a vegetarian, I can't say too much for the food, but that's pretty much on par with any gathering...I've learned to carry plenty or protein bars over the years.  Bottom line, for $50 this absolutely has to be best value for your buck in training (other than Wintellect's DevScovery, of course *smile*). 

While my colleagues, Steve Porter and Keith Rome, offered four really great talks on Silverlight topics, I was there to present on all the new things available with Cascading Style Sheets (sarcasm off).  Actually, my CSS talk went really well and I received lots of good feedback which I'll continue to roll into that presentation.  All sarcasm aside, most web developers (especially those in Enterprise positions) are stuck with CSS for the foreseeable future and this presentation really aims to go through the major areas where I see developers struggling and try and cast some light on how all those pieces play together.  Thanks to all that made it to the talk (standing room only!) and for the emails that I've received since.

I've updated the slides and code with this past weekend's revisions and you can get it here:

CSS Deep Dive for the ASP.NET Developer

I believe that the other presentations will be posted on the devLink website, so keep an eye out for them.  There were a lot of good ones!

Thanks to all the folks that came to my Deep Dive CSS for the ASP.NET Developer session at this past weekend's Atlanta Code Camp.  I got some really great feedback from the evaluations and will definitely incorporate some suggestions into this presentation in the future. 

The abstract, updated code and slides are available here:

 Deep Dive CSS for the ASP.NET Developer

Thanks everyone for the comments and tips offered after I gave this presentation at Alabama Code Camp, as well as, at the Atlanta Cutting Edge .NET group last week.  I received several "so that's how it works" comments and that was exactly the point of this talk.

Here is the abstract of the presentation:

This will be a thorough discussion of all that is CSS.  Whether you know it as the necessary evil or the great enabler (that just hasn’t quite clicked for you yet), you should walk away with something valuable from this discussion.  I will begin with the basic box model and travel all the way to the holiest of grails (the no tables here, two and three column ASP.NET Master Page layout…yours to take home for free!).  Along the way, we’ll touch on some CSS Best Practices and gotchas in ASP.NET and take a look at the new CSS tools in Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas).

Get the download here.

Note:  The solution file provided is from Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) Beta 2.  There is nothing .NET 3.5 specific (as most of it is HTML anyway).   

Update 04/01/08:  Updated the download to compile under Visual Studio 2008 RTM

Finally able to grab a minute to post my code and slides from the Introduction to Generics presentation that I did this past weekend at the Alabama Code Camp at the University of Alabama. 

This is the abstract from the presentation:

With the release of the 2.0 version of the .NET Framework, Generics became first class citizens

in the Common Language Runtime.  Yet, many still shy away from using them because of perceived difficulty or other misconceptions.   This presentation will seek to dispel a few of these myths and offer a gentle introduction into using Generics on a daily basis.  Along the way, I’ll also demonstrate language enhancements in the .NET 3.5 runtime that lend themselves nicely to working with Generics. 

Get the download here.  

Note:  The code is compiled on Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) Beta 2.  The only project in the solution that uses .NET 3.5 specific code is the Collections project.  This uses C# 3.5 Automatic Properties and Property Initializers.