DevTeach Day 2 - An Unexpected Turn

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Wednesday: I woke up this morning (yes it was still morning, I made it to bed before 3am, I think), feeling chipper and excited that I'd be able to spend the day attending sessions. I wasn't scheduled for any talks today, just tomorrow, so I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to learn something.

The first session I attended was an intro to F# that Ted Neward was giving. The talk was interesting, but I must admit I was a bit lost in the syntax at times. However, when Ted opened up ILDASM and showed the IL code that was being generated it started to click better for me. I dream in VB and OOP and F# is a purely functional language so it was a stretch.

 

As a former business systems architect, I was more interested in hearing where using F# in your application made the most sense. Ted's (unproven) hypothesis is that F# would make a good middle-tier and work well with REST-based applications. Hmmmm... interesting.

So now for the unexpected turn. In the beginning of the talk one of the other speakers, Etienne Tremblay, mentioned that Roy Osherove ended up in the hospital because he completely lost his voice and was feeling sick. (FEEL BETTER, ROY!) I jumped up and headed over to the conference organizer, Jean-Rene, and mentioned I could fill in if needed. He said he would let me know so I headed back into the F# session.

After the session I headed to lunch and JR came up to me and asked me to fill in for a LINQ talk. Roy's talk was called "LINQ to Anything - Building your own custom LINQ provider". I decided to do something a tad more mainstream and made up an abstract and titled it "LINQ to Everything" :-)

LINQ to Everything

In this session we will go over the major LINQ providers that shipped with Visual Studio 2008/.NET 3.5 and how to effectively use them in common business scenarios. We’ll go over LINQ to relational data using LINQ to DataSets and LINQ to SQL pointing out the benefits to each approach. We’ll also go over LINQ to XML and demonstrate some practical uses of creating, querying, transforming XML as well as how to take advantage of this technology with Office.

Sounds good to me! Now I'm working on a few demos while I'm sitting in a session on Silverlight 2.0 with Alan Griver because this room has a nice bunch of electrical outlets :-)

I'll report back and let you know how my LINQ talk goes. I just love filling in at the last minute. It keeps me on my toes.