Following on from my previous blog, the highlights of day 3 had to be my friend Bill O'Brien's talk on Patterns in the Enterprise (ARC309) and Clemens Vasters' Best Practices for Dealing with State at Multiple Layers Within Your .NET Applications (CTS404).
Bill took the audience on a journey of software development, carefully explaining key concepts from the ground up. He discussed the real life difficulties of "code re-use", the Holy Gail of software development and suggested a much better take home, "knowledge re-use". Using Patterns he explained, member's of the team have a whole new vocabulary with which they are able to communicate vast amounts of information in a single sentence.
Bill went on to give some real life examples of well known patterns such as Model View Controller (MVC) and Factory, before introducing some less well known Enterprise Patterns such as Integration and Enterprise Solution. Using Microsoft's pattern diagram, Bill explained where patterns fit in relation to one another and how they can be grouped into "clusters" which provide assistance in making more informed choices. Overall a very difficult topic, delivered with excellence!
Clemens did his usual wizardry on the audience and gave everyone good reasons to bow down to anything he might say regarding COM+. His talk was on State Management and started out by explaining why there was no such thing as "Stateless". While everyone is told over and over again that keeping state is "bad", he explained why keeping state is often "good". In a clever observation, he explained some of the internals of the Garbage Collector and why not using session state is wasteful since the data is more than likely still around from the previous call, waiting to be garbage collected.
He backed this up with an example of using .NET Weak References to tentatively hold on to objects in Session State. This has got to be the cleverest piece of code I have seen so far at the conference and as usual, Clemen's code examples are not lightweight, they are always production quality.
These and other code examples from Clemens, including very clever and best practice use of COM+ are going to be made available in the forthcoming release of Proseware.