p&p, day 1

It's cool to hear a keynote speech in this field and basically understand what it's about.

This morning, LINQ, which seems like a way of replacing inline SQL with inline SQL. OK, not really. LINQ code in C# seems a lot better for maintenance and code clarity, but our speaker mentioned that it encapsulates the "how" away from the "what" and I'm not sure I see how it does that.

I learned a new verb, "to new up" (to instantiate).

Now we're talking about patterns, and our (next) speaker has pointed out that patterns aren't widely used because they are "difficult to contextualize". I like that; it's a highfalutin' way of saying what I've struggled with all along. His analogy, however, that it's like searching for a recipe and getting only a list of ingredients, is funny considering my friend in culinary school has been trained to handle that exact situation and convert the ingredients into a delicious dish. In other words, she's a better patterns architect than I am.

More to come...