I attended a number of seminars today, some were good (What’s New In SQL Server 2005 for Developers, Operator Overloading, Generics and BackgroundWorker in VB.Net) some were not so good (Stored Procedures with CLR in SQL Server 2005) and a couple were great (The ‘My’ Namespace in VB.Net, and Application Frameworks in VB.Net). I was irritated by the CLR SP talk because the speaker, William Vaughn, took up a bunch of time at the beginning telling jokes and relating personal political opinions. Thus, he had to rush through the actual content of his presentation, hold us over time and still not complete his presentation. I had heard he was a good presenter, but it did not show during this session.

2 pieces of information that I took away from the ‘My’ Namespaces presentation that others might be interested in:

1. When you set a VB.Net application to be a single instance application (via Project
   Properties) you can add code to the event handler StartUpNewInstance. You can also
   add code to the event handler HandleUnhandledException. If you add code to either
   of these event handlers (and possibly other new application wide event handlers) you
   must test the code outside of the debugger (Ctrl-F5). If not, the debugger will catch
   the exception before the event is fired.
2. I had heard conflicting reports about the availability of the ‘My’ namespace in C#.
   According to Microsoft, the ‘My’ functionality will only be available in VB.Net.
   According to the speaker, this is because C# does not have a background compiler running
   that can dynamically recompile the information into strongly typed classes. This statement
   was not corrected or countered by the Program Manager in charge the ‘My’ namespaces
   who was in the audience. I expect that the ‘My’ namespace will be so beneficial to
   me, that I will be creating all new projects in VB.Net, instead of C# (which I have
   been using, almost exclusively, for over 2 years).