Scott Hanselman gave a talk at the Victoria .NET Nerds Developer Association tonight. It was very good. I’d heard that he was a great speaker and my hearing was right. He was all over the map, and since I read his blog, a lot of his technical asides (showing tools, etc.) weren’t news to me.
Still I picked up a few things and he almost convinced me to switch to dasBlog with his presentation. Officially, his talk was about ASP.NET Software Architecture using dasBlog as an example. There are lots of cool things in that project.
The second coolest thing was something he showed in passing: the Call Stack Window in VS that Microsoft does by default is to repress the stack for all non-user code. Apparently, you can right click and choose to show that. I had no idea aobut this, but I’ll be sure to turn that setting on at work tomorrow. He called it the switch that means “I prefer the Matrix.” Hilarious.
The coolest thing was when he was deep in the bowels of generated XmlSerializer code and someone asked why the object properties had the ‘@’ character in front of them. He didn’t know (actually, he couldn’t remember); but I did. That’s the syntax used when the property name could be a reserved word of C# (My google skills aren’t with me tonight; I can’t find a reference to that piece of C# lore). Yes!
It was a great talk. Hopefully, he can come back soon.