Pierre-Emmanuel Dautreppe

To conclude my Tech Days 2008 posts, I wanted to add a section with the list of question I have asked to the different speakers and their answers.

• Ingo Rammer - after the "Advanced Debugging" Session
  • For debugging purposes, I have been working with the Performance tools of Visual Studio and I have experience some strange behaviors : when trying to visualise the function call tree to see which par of my code was taking long, I could not visualize the full call tree. Do you have seen any limitation on this tool that could explain this problem ?
    • Unfortunately, I mainly work in "Production Debugging mode" where I don't have any Visual Studio installation available and so I don't know very well the performance tools of Visual Studio.
  • And when you need to trace performance of you application, which tool do you use ?
    • There is the tool of RedGate (Note : ANTS), but I don't like it so much. I prefer using dotTrace  

• Nikhil Kothari - after the "Ajax Patterns" Session
  • I have been really interested by the last part of your demo, using Silverlight to read a client file. Is there currently any possibilities for Silverlight to interact with client resources ? eg getting access to a card reader ?
    • Currently only the ReadFile function allow to access client resources. So unless the card reader allow this kind of API, no it's not possible.
  • Do you know if there is something planned ?
    • There are of course improvements planned for Silverlight, but I don't know if this kind of enhancements is foreseen  

• Jelle Druyts - after the "Domain-Specific Developments with Visual Studio DSL Tools" Session
  • I have been workinng with the DSL tools but a very long time ago and I am curious to compare what I have seen at this time - when it was immature - and now. Does the T4 template files are still shipped with a model ? (and so copied multiple times for each solution we will use the DSL tool ?)
    • Unfortunately yes. This does not really makes sense and moreover it does complicate any patch or upate to the tool. But what is possible - and what I have done for the Configuration Section Designer - is to provide a very small  T4 template file that will just link to the real file, installed in a common location, eg in the program files folder.
  • And can the T4 templates generate now multiple files ?
    • No still not. It's a pity because it could me more readable (Note : even if the generated files should not be read) to generate several files, and also in different locations, as for example in different projects to allow a full separation of concerns. This will probably arrive in the future.
  • And do we still have the limitation to have only one model by project ?
    • No. The transformation is based on file extension. As a consequence, we can now have as many model as we want.

•  Roy Osherove - after the "Deep Reflection" Session - Get the slides here
  • I'm curious to know, when you would generate IL at runtime using the techniques you have shown, and when you will use an AOP framework to do the same at compile time ?
    • Well I have never been needint to use an AOP framework. But anyway philosophically speaking, I would never generate IL at runtime
  •  Honestly me neither. But sometimes we need
  • I wanted also to re-ask the same question about the performance tools that I haved asked to Ingo Rammer, but I got the same answer.
  • And are you still working on "the Regulator"
    • Not really now. I don't really have time and try to focus on my book (Note : The art of Unit Testing) for now.

Thanks all to all theses comments ! I would have liked to speak more about the sessions, but the schedule is so fast we couldn't continue. But great event, and great speakers !