So, its been a long time (has it been over a year, really?) since I’ve been to one of the Dayton .NET Developers Group meetings. I got the notification last week about the upcoming meeting, and it reminded me of how much I used to enjoy going to those meetings. So I worked it out with my wife to go to tonight’s meeting.

Now, I have to be completely honest here…the biggest motivator for me in going to the meeting tonight was the fact that they were giving away free copies of Visual Studio 2008. Why was that my primary motivation? Mostly because the topic for the meeting didn’t sound exceptionally exciting: “A lap around Visual Studio 2008″. Oh no…I’ve heard that one before. A bunch of marketing speak about all of the “fabulous” new features of the IDE that make developers lives “easier”. You know the stuff I’m talking about…the designer enhancements, the wizards, the “look-how-much-I-can-do-without-writing-a-single-line-of-code” kind of presentation. Blah blah blah…I’ve heard it all before. And I was right.

Partially.

Justin Kohnen did a pretty good job on the presentation. I said I was partially right, because he did emphasize a lot of the improvements they’ve made to the ASP.NET designer…which really didn’t do much for me…I’ve never liked web designers at all. Designers, in my experience, tend to be code generators that abstract away the stuff that’s actually going on in the background without really increasing my productivity. 90% or more of the code generators I’ve ever used tend to generate WAAYYY more code than is really necessary. Code that I could almost just as easily write by hand just as efficiently. If all of that isn’t enough, I really just don’t like ‘em (SubSonic being the one, major exception…its unbelievable). Not only that, but a lot of times, you really don’t know what’s going on behind-the-scenes with code generators either…but now I’m just babbling. Anyway…he spent some time demonstrating some of the new features of the CSS editor, and I’m pretty certain that I could’ve hand-written the CSS he generated much faster than he was able to do with the designer. I just wasn’t impressed with the new “designer” features.

There are a couple of pretty significant things that I was pretty impressed with in VS 2008 though. First thing was the code metrics that are not integrated directly into the IDE. Very nice feature to have. I also like the fact that the MSTest unit testing framework is now available in the Professional version of Visual Studio, and not just the TFS versions. I don’t personally have any experience with MSTest at all, and from what I’ve read about it in general, I still think I’ll be sticking with either NUnit or MbUnit…but its certainly nice to have options in scenarios where open source tools aren’t approved for use and TFS isn’t affordable (which is probably most cases). Probably the best new feature of VS that I was impressed with was the Javascript intellisense in the code editor. Very, very nice stuff. You can debug it too…which is…an OK feature. I wasn’t really blown away by that, as I’ve gotten pretty used to the glory that is Firebug over the past couple of years (seriously, I’m not sure what I’d do without that tool anymore, its incredible), but again, having the option to debug JS in VS is nice.

Now, here’s the part where I was really impressed. I think Justin should consider at least slightly changing the name of his presentation if he plans on giving this talk again (maybe at the Central Ohio Day of .NET?), because almost the entire second half of his talk was centered around a demo of the various flavors of LINQ now available in the .NET Framework. This was, in my opinion, by far the best part of the talk. I have to admit, before tonight, I had questioned most of the hype that I’ve read around the internet recently regarding LINQ. After tonight, I will no longer question the hype. I was really impressed by the stuff Justin showed us about how LINQ can simplify a lot of your data manipulation tasks. I was particularly impressed with the LINQ to XML flavor. I can hardly express in words how dramatically LINQ to XML will simplify working with XML from now on. I don’t have a comparison immediately available, but I will try to come up with a code sample comparing XML manipulation using System.Xml vs System.Xml.Linq sometime in the near future. You almost have to see it in that form to see how dramatic the difference is. Its very cool stuff.

Anyway…this has been a lot more long-winded of a blog post than I had intended. Bottom line…it was good to get back to the .NET dev group. Good presentation Justin. I’m looking forward to more good stuff like that from the dev group.

Oh yeah…bonus…I won a copy of ReSharper too. Never really used it before outside of a few days with a trial version…never really saw the hype about it either, but…who knows. Now that I have a licensed copy (I *definitely* couldn’t justify the cost before), maybe I’ll give it another shot…maybe I’ll see the light this time. *shrug*