Blogging Live from CodeMash - update

Session 2 was all about Sharepoint 3.0 & MOSS 2007.  This was completely from a programming standpoint and not so much from a configuration view.  The speaker Leon Gersing did not pull any punches, which is a good thing.  Sharepont 2.0 was horrible apparently and 3.0 is better but not the be all it could be.  It will do 80% of things really well, right out of the box.  But for 20% it can be a pain but achievable.  The thing I don’t get is Microsoft whose best quality is ease of tools & deployment made custom sharepoint push outs really difficult.

After lunch, we had our 2nd keynote, the one and only Scott Hanselman.  Seriously his first 10 minutes were insanely funny.  The guy is great presenter.  I hope I’m not showing a man crush here ;).  The rest of his talk focused on IIS7 and PHP.  I was super impressed with IIS7 features, including FastCGI, Caching, and config files.  Yes, that right IIS now has a httpd.conf version. Performance wise IIS is beating what I’ve seen from Apache.  I think I’m ready to start using PHP/IIS, in the past I’ve been against it because 1) PHP CGI Module for IIS was slow and 2) PHP ISAPI was unstable.

More to come…

Written by Tim on January 10th, 2008 with 1 comment.
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Blogging Live from CodeMash

I’m in session #2 right now, here is recap of today so far:

Keynote: Neil Ford - Thoughtworks guy and ruby man.

We’ll he kinda dissed Java for an half an hour.  Not much a fan of strongly typed languages (funny he use to be a c# guy), but now prefers Ruby.  Overall a great talk, compared software engineering to "real" engineer.  Basically came away with this: Compared to "real" engineering, we are in the 1800’s timeframe. JVM & .NET are fundamentally frameworks and we should use dynamic languages on top of these not the strongly named types they were original intended for.  Also that unit testing, and testing in general is what is the most important - obviously a TDD guy.

First session, focused on SIlverlight.  Obviously this was a beginners talk more about the basics of Silverlight.  I didn’t come away with much besides I like Silverlight better then Flash because silverlight was developed with developer more in focus.  XML based configuration, not a binary like swf.

More to come…

Written by Tim on January 10th, 2008 with no comments.
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