Conference - Houston TechFest 9/26/2009

The conference was held in University of Houston main campus. It was such a great free conference. Highly recommend it to other tech folks in Greater Houston Area. Below are the sessions I have attended to give some ideas to have the complete list, you can go to the following link.

http://houstontechfest.com/

Session 1: Preparing for Your Organization’s SharePoint Future in SharePoint 2010

by Erin O’Connor

• Ribbon Styled
• Visio 2010 Added
• Silverlight
• BDC changed to two-way BCS
• Performance Point to bring BI
• Firefox, Safari and IE compatible. No support IE 6 anymore
• Offline workspace support
• Only support 64 bits server
• SPaaS

Session 2: Microsoft Dynamics xRM by Daniel Hunter

• xRM 4.0 demo

Birds of a feather – Staying Alive: Social Media Tips for Techies

Session 3: What’s new in C# 4.0

• Optional Parameters
• Named Parameters
• Dynamics (same as object, however it defer the binding in runtime).

Session 4: VSTS/TFS 2010 (Mike Azocar, and Mike Moles)

• Best improvement: QA, Architecture, and Gated Check-in
• Branch Visualization
• Work Item Tracking
• Work Item Hierarchy (even working in Excel)
• Track change set across branches
• Rolling tests, Test impacted test cases (Unit Tests Improvement)
• QA: Historical Debugging – No repro
• QA: Test and Lab Manager
• Built on WPF
• Catch a bug earlier will save cost by multiple times
• Build Controller with WF

Session 5: Best practices on Developing and Customizing Web Parts

• Recommend using built-in web parts such as DataForm and DataView
• MVP – Model, View, and Presenter

Final Session: Prize Drawing

• I won a Resharper license worthy of the market value $199.00.

Interesting Interview Code Question

My colleague sent me an interesting interview code question and it's pretty fun.

using System;

namespace SomeNamespaceName {

class A {

public void DoAStuff( ) { Console.WriteLine( "A::DoAStuff()" ); }

}

class B {

public void DoBStuff( ) { Console.WriteLine( "B::DoBStuff()" ); }

}

class C {

A _innerA = new A();

B _innerB = new B( );

public static implicit operator A (C c ) {

return c._innerA;

}

public static implicit operator B( C c ) {

return c._innerB;

}

public void DoAStuff( ) { ( ( A )this ).DoAStuff( ); }

public void DoBStuff( ) { ( ( B )this ).DoBStuff( ); }

}

class Program {

static void PassA( A a ) { a.DoAStuff( ); }

static void PassB( B b ) { b.DoBStuff( ); }

static void Main( string[ ] args ) {

C c = new C( );

PassA( c );

PassB( c );

c.DoAStuff( );

c.DoBStuff( );

}

}

}

Question:

1) What does the code print out?

A: A::DoAStuff()
B::DoBStuff()
A::DoAStuff()
B::DoBStuff()

2) Why does it work?

Op A: Operator Overloading

3) Why would I write code like this?

Mu A: Multiple Inheritance Workaround

4) Explain how it works?

A: Using operator overloading A and B to achieve the “type casting” A and B (not the same instance).

Upgraded my home PC from Vista to Windows 7

Finally I upgraded my Vista from home premium to ultimate. It took more than 3 hours to finish. The process was smooth. After I hit upgrade button then hands-off. I started the Windows 7 upgrade (in-system) it warned me that Vista will no longer available and a few programs or drivers will be no longer compatible. In deed, after the upgrading, my Visual Studio 2008 can't work and have to reinstall.

The upgrade process were divided into the following stages.

• Copying files (fast)
• Gathering files, settings, and programs (slow)
• Expanding Windows
• Installing features and updates
• Transferring files, settings, and programs (slow)

So according to my colleague, the installation process is much faster if you are doing a fresh installation.

I am pretty happy with the speed of the operating system. The time of waiting has been significantly reduced comparing to Vista. Visual Studio seems much faster to launch now. IE works much faster and the frequency of hanging is significantly reduced. The interface is much easier to use.