CMAP meeting: ASP.NET MVC4

I attended the CMAP (Central Maryland Association of .NET Professionals) tonight. The topic was "ASP.NET MVC4", a new version of Microsoft's web development framework.

Impressions of the meeting: Well attended. Every chair in the room was filled, with more attendees than planned. There were more attendees than the 'after meeting survey' forms, yet enough pizza for all attendees (at least those who desired pizza). It's nice to see interest in technical knowledge.

Impressions of the tech: This new version has some nice features. I'm not qualified to list them; I don't work with earlier versions and cannot compare them. Yet the tech follows in Microsoft's tradition of Visual Studio tools: wizards to built 'empty' projects (with varying degrees of non-emptiness) and a steep learning curve to accomplish anything meaningful. The .NET framework is large. It does a lot, and it demands a lot. The biggest challenge is knowing the classes available; even the presenter tonight stumbled on some class names. (A case of knowing that classes to perform specific chores do exist, but not remembering the name.)

Microsoft WebMatrix

I attended the CMAP (Central Maryland Association of .NET Professionals) tonight. The presentation was on Microsoft's new "WebMatrix" development tool, a low-end web page/app editor/builder.

WebMatrix is pretty nice, for what it does. The description "low-end app builder" is perhaps not quite accurate, nor is "high-powered HTML editor". WebMatrix is an IDE and a set of libraries that sit on top of .NET, run under IIS, and serve dynamic web pages. You can program web pages with this funny little language (like PHP or ASP or JSP) and get results pretty quickly. I got a lot out of the presentation.

I also chatted with a bunch of folks, including my friend Ben who wants to attend ShmooCon. Apparently the tickets have already sold out, and he missed the small window.

And bonuses: I picked up a copy of a book on IronRuby (the .NET implementation from Microsoft) and a USB memory stick with Microsoft Windows Phone stuff on it.

All in all, a good evening.

Professional meeting, Microsoft, and networking

I attended the CMAP meeting last night. I chatted with some folks before the meeting started, and listened to the presentation on Microsoft's "Entity Framework 4". (The previous version was Entity Framework 1"; Microsoft changed to version 4 to match the version number of C# and .NET Framework.

The presentation went at a slow pace, and gave me some time to think about the Baltimore Beehive, the local co-working location. If I get the opportunity to work there (say, one day every other week) I would need a PC. My trusty IBM ThinkPad just died, so it won't be that one. I could replace is, or I could use the Apple MacBook. Or, I could get a tablet, although I think a computer with a keyboard would be better for coding.

A day at the Beehive would also give me the opportunity to network with other folks, perhaps at lunchtime meetings.