I took the trip down to Dallas with the family and gave my second ever full length presentation on Introduction to Programming Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) at the Dallas Code Camp. We were supposed to have a connection check the night before, but I was too excited after arriving at the Microsoft headquarters to do anything like that and was left to just look around in awe. The Las Colinas campus is really cool. I just wish we had some office location like it in Tulsa that we could use for our monthly meetings. Not to mention there were quite a few tables and chairs to be rearranged to accommodate our hopeful 250. I'm still waiting on exact numbers, but I think we had even more attrition that expected. I'd estimate about 200 attendees. I won't bother to repeat the great details a fellow Tulsan who attended blogged about: Chris Patterson. Very first thing after the quick welcoming introduction, I was off to give my presentation. There was approximately 20 attendees and was more interactive than I had anticipated, but that made it even more beneficial for all. One thing that I need to add to this presentation is coverage of how IIS and WCF work together with current versions of IIS and the upcoming IIS 7. Hopefully, I'll get an exact head count and survey results from the meeting soon. Right after this presentation I went to host a Chalk Talk on "Converting ASP to .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0". This was a 1 hour and 10 minute discussion that I believe everyone benefited from. I just had a few key notes that I wanted to make on the subject and they definitely got driven in depth through discussion. When I first began learning ASP.NET, when it was still pre-release beta, I simply downloaded the framework runtime and took a classic ASP application and moved it to .NET by renaming it from ASP to ASPX and fixing anything that broke. Which in reality was very little, mostly syntax, like parenthesis around response.write("hello world"), etc. This is obviously not the best way to convert an ASP app to .NET, in fact, I went into the meeting questioning whether any benefit could be gained from this. As a community, we discovered there are a few things. If you don't have the time to analyze the application and redesign it using an n-tier module (which is what I suggest) for rewrite using .NET, then this can be a first step and gain the benefits of sharing the .NET Session State across legacy ASP applications and .NET applications. Know of any other reasons? Let me know. When converting ASP to .NET 1.1, the biggest obstacle was the proliferate usage of file includes that classic ASP developers typically used. The most common being a header and a footer. To migrate this presentation layer to .NET 1.1 you had to either make use of User Controls and add it to every page or use a Base Class for your pages, which I think early on most people were unaware of this option. So, User Controls was the way most developers went and that didn't sound like fun to me. Now when converting ASP or .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0 we can take advantage of the MasterPages (base class concept) and easily meet the needs that we've been trying to meet with various kludge methods in the past. .NET 2.0 makes converting from past versions even more rewarding and easier to achieve. During lunch break, it's time to eat fast so I could be part of the Speaker Panel and answer any questions that were thrown out. After lunch I attended David McKinstry Team System presentation. Team System is an awesome tool and with it's extensibility features is flexible enough to easily meet the needs of any development process and standards. If only more companies would make the investment and become a professional development environment, instead of wandering around in the dark, or using homegrown and ugly processes. The last presentation I attended was Cory Smith's "High Performance Winform applications". This was a very much needed presentation that everyone could gain some ideas and insight into making performance improvements in their applications. Cory is a very good presenter. The real consideration is the impact WPF will have have on Winform development, but knowing how long it takes the typical company to move to the next version of anything, these tips will be needed for quite some time to come. Of course, I've invited everyone who presented at the Dallas Code Camp to present at our October 14th Tech Fest! So, don't worry guys, if you couldn't make the trip down to Dallas we've already confirmed several of them to come up here and teach you as well.