Ernst Kuschke

We started the day with some Executive Keynotes. The interesting thing is that MOST of it wasn't boring at all, and we had the opportunity to ask questions to Steve Ballmer, Jim Allchin, Kevin Johnson, and a few others. Jim's demo really impressed me. One of the highlights was a Vista feature called Prefetch. Prefetch optimises the way your virtual memory / pagefile works in that it doesn't (as it currently works) load stuff that has been in use over the last few minutes. Oh no. It actually builds a profile of commonly loaded “stuff” over your PC's *entire lifetime*, and automagically pages that as soon as there is time. So when you open your commonly used applications they just load faster. In addition to that, and this is the cool part, it uses any available memory. As soon as you stick a USB memstick into your PC, the pagefile will actually be expanded to this space. This is encrypted so you don't need to worry about walking around with unknown potentially sensitive data.

I am pretty tired so I'll put some more usefulk info up here tomorrow through the day. Other cool people I met today include Scott Hanselmann, Don Box, Rocky Lothka, Raj Pai, Scott Wiltamuth, the list goes on... man, they're all here! I saw old friends Roy Osherove, Miha Markic, Francois Bonin, Scott Nonnenberg, some others...

A few pics to be found here.

The last four days were spent in gorgeous Brazil. I got there on Thursday evening and headed straight for Impacta for a talk on Continuous Integration. Speaking with constant translation was really challenging, and I got the feeling that the message wasn't conveyed to the audience as effectively. It was an interesting experience nonetheless.

On Friday morning Camila and I headed for Juquehy to spend the weekend. I realised how different Brazillian Portuguese is from the Portuguese I have been learning back in South Africa, and that I have pretty far to go until I can call myself proficient. The weekend was amazing!!!

We headed back to Sao Paulo (the craziest city I've ever seen) on Sunday evening and spent Monday just loitering around town. Monday night I caught a flight to Dallas and the quality of the flight made me realise how much I have become accustomed to South African Airways - they ROCK. Their wide choice of unlimited free drinks, better food, *METAL CUTLERY* and personal in-flight entertainment are a few of the things that make a long journey slightly more bearable.

We spent the afternoon checking out the Pike Place Market (stunning) and had fresh fish at the highly recommended “Market Grill“. I'm staying in “The W“ in downtown Seattle - perfectly situated to roam and explore the city and afterwards crawling into a heavenly bed!

Highlight of the trip so far: spending time with Camila. Highlight of the day: Having my *first ever* Starbucks coffee (Iced Mocha) in the *first ever*, original Starbucks shop, Seattle:

Just arrived in Seattle after a 15 hour flight from Sao Paulo, Brazil. Seattle looks like a gorgeous city, and I'm waiting on Arno to get ready so we can go explore the sites. (This is the view from his Hotelroom) We're off to find food - I'll report back on sightings as soon as is possible!

Once again I will speak about Continuous Integration, this time it will be at Impacta Tecnologia in Sao Paulo. I'm looking forward to this one as it will be my first talk that will be translated on the fly as I speak!! (Most people in Brazil speak only Portuguese with a very limited grasp on English).

Reserve a seat here.

If you think the leap from C# 1.0 to C# 2.0 was big, you ain't seen nothing yet! C# 3.0 will contain a tremendous increase in functionality.

As I work my way through the new specs, I'll post my impression on this blog, so check back once in a while if you're interested in the cool new features we can expect in Orcas.

Object Initialisers

When initialising an object (not a value-type), you are now able to specify initialisers to properties on your object, as well as for objects embedded in the object you are initialising. That just sounds crazy, let's see an example. (Please, no comments on the Address class! :P)

Employee lourens = new Employee();
lourens.Name = “Lourens“;
lourens.Age = 23;
Address newAddress = new Address();
newAddress.StreetName = “Rivonia Road”;
newAddress.StreetNumber = “12“;
lourens.Address = newAddress;
lourens.PhoneNumbers.Add(“555-1234“);
lourens.PhoneNumbers.Add(“333-7890“);

Can now be written as:

Employee lourens = new Employee {
    Name = “Lourens“,
    Age = “23“,
    new Address {StreetName = “Rivonia Road“, StreetNumber = “12“},
    PhoneNumbers = {“555-1234“, “333-7890“}   
}

Now that is really handy, and even though new syntax, much more readable (IMHO) than the first code snippet!

Is it just me, or is code becoming harder to read? The C# code I've been going through lately, containing the new lambda functions intermixed with generics, really introduced a new learning curve - to me in any case.

Something I always liked about C# is the fact that by just looking at something I could immediately see what it's purpose/functionality is. It now requires a few moments of staring... and I really can't wait for this feeling to go away!

Real simple generics baffles me sometimes - just yesterday the java definition of Enum bugged me again: Enum<T extends Enum<T>> Thanks, Rivaaj, for clearing my head for me...

I've been so excited to post about this, but have been under NDA. LINQ will form part of the next release of Visual Studio, codenamed Orcas. The proposed specs have gone live!

• LINQ
• C# 3.0 proposed spec

LINQ is the idea that Anders Hejlsberg has been dropping hints about in various interviews. It will enable you to query relational as well as XML structured data. Lots of code is written to transform and map data to objects in todays' world. LINQ is the solution for this.

I'll be talking on Continuous Integration at the next Johannesburg SADev meeting in September:

When:          14th September 2005, 18:00 – 19:00

Venue:         Torque IT, Rivonia (Map)

Presenter:     Ernst Kuschke

Topic:           Continous Intergration

Level:           300 (levels)

Objective:     The Extreme Programming (XP) Development Methodology defines many concepts, one them being Continuous Integration, which will be discussed in this meeting. Knowledge of the following concepts will be useful, but isn’t compulsory:

·         Source Code Control

·         Build Systems

·         Unit Testing

·         Code Coverage Analysis

Once you’ve tried Continuous Integration, you’ll feel naked without it!

From the Business Day:

At the end of the month is the Global MVP Summit in at Microsoft Corp. in Seattle. This is one awesome opportunity for us to interact with our product teams - mine being the C# team. I'm staying in the W Seattle, right in downtown Seattle. Oh yeah!!! I am routing this trip via Brazil. Some of you will think I'm insane (most being correct!) to take such a detour. Besides it being such an awesome country with great people, there's a very special, tiny girl in Brazil that makes me do crazy things.

Some highlights of my trip will be:

• Spending time with Camila in her paradise
• Keith Yedlin is taking me for a night on the town in Seattle
• Seeing Steve Ballmer (again!)
• Chatting to the C# guys - who knows, Anders might be around!!
• A quick stop in Miami on the way back