Date: 08/19/05 (Asp Dot Net)    Keywords: asp

Did anyone go to the ASP.NET MSDN Roadshow in Burbank yesterday? If so, what did you think about it?

I was pretty disappointed -- the presenter seemed too unknowledgable to be presenting about ASP.NET 2.0. It was the little things really.. for instance, to make the code and it'll make the link for you.. most likely, based off of his example, you'll spend the rest of your time in 2.0 copy/pasting when you want to embed a stylesheet. That is, until you accidently figure it out for yourself, you read it somewhere or someone else says "wtf don't you just drag and drop it?"

Another thing that he said was completely inaccurate. He was talking about the cool new things you can do with themes/master pages. "You know how you can't use SSI in Classic ASP to make dynamic titles?" At first I thought he was just kidding but he said it again later. I totally use SSI and Classic ASP for my themed site and my . Is that really creative genius? He also said he used .inc files which..I know Microsoft did but it doesn't make sense. People can see your code. All of my include files were .asp in the event that people tried to go snooping.

He also kept going and going even when it was obvious people needed a break. But I stayed through the first two hours and when he gave the break, I went up to ask him how to make dynamic titles in Master pages. See, he'd type in manually Title=Page1 or Title=Page2 and override what the Master said but I don't always know what the title of my page will be. I gave him an example with my recipe site.. 1 page is in control of all of my recipes so I don't know what my title will be until the person loads up the page. He looked lost. So I just stated "Can the title be a variable?" "Uhmm. Probably, yeah."

At that point I left because while I knew enough about Master pages for him not to throw me off, I don't think I knew enough about his next 2 subjects and I didn't want to learn how to do it the wrong way and then be stuck in that mindset.

I wonder what he was stuck in.. Kinda reminds me of this book I'm reading that said this...

“We were writing a new system in C++, but most of our programmers didn’t have much experience in C++. They came from Fortran backgrounds. They wrote code that compiled in C++, but they were really writing disguised Fortran. They stretched C++ to emulate Fortran’s bad features (such as gotos and global data) and ignored C++’s rich set of object-oriented capabilities.”

I feel that he didn't go out of his way to relearn 2.0 and he continued to use his 1.1 techniques. So yeah, if you are going to the MSDN roadshow and Bernard Wong is presenting, be warned!

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/aspdotnet/41148.html