Lansing Day of .NET 2009 Review

I had a great time at the Lansing Day of .NET Saturday.  I really enjoyed seeing everyone there, and we got fancy cool LDODN 2k9 beer tumblers.  There was a great after party at Jeff McWherter's that Eric Vogel helped me get to.  My favorite sessions were T4: Code Generation with Visual Studio 2008 by Steve Andrews and Improving our Craft: A Discussion on Software Estimation by Mike Eaton.

The T4 Code Generation facilities allow you to leverage the power of C# or VB.NET to write code generation scripts.  It also seemed straightforward to extend the code generators and also code generation hosts. The code generation kicks off by default when you save the file in Visual Studio, but one could write a custom host to execute it from a command line environment or during the build process..  The session showed some interesting scenarios for generating help documentation and a data layer using T4.  I don't plan on using T4 anytime soon, but I'm glad to know the tool exists and have had an overview of it's capabilities.  I've seen Steve Andrews present before and I like his style.  He mixes in keyboard shortcut tips and shows Visual Studio configuration options during the talks I've seen.

Mike Eaton's presentation on Software Estimation initiated some interesting discussion topics and thoughts to ponder.  He is an engaging speaker and had some funny cartoons.  Mike was especially adept at involving the audience in the presentation.