Spreading the custom controls love
Last Wednesday Microsoft Argentina organized the MSDN Briefing, a big event, that was attended by more than 1000 local developers. They asked me to do a presentation about advanced ASP.NET programming. I wanted to talk about development of advanced custom controls (i.e. templating, databinding, complex designer support, etc) but I was not sure about the current number of developers that were doing this kind of stuff that may be interested in the talk. So risking myself to having just a few (or zero) attendees I decided to go with it anyway.
To my surprise it was one of the most attended talks (surpassing other “favourites” talks like the webservices one). During the two-hour talk I received lots of questions and a few complains (hey! I’m not from Microsoft! You should complain to them! J).
The questions were mainly basic ones; none of them were actually implementing complex designer stuff or developing controls that supported either templates or databinding. Just a few ones were actually beginning to explore these topics.
On the complain side, documentation (poor documentation, that is) was #1 by far. I told them I agreed with them, but I’m not sure if they really believed me (maybe it was the MS t-shirt that I received for the event…).
I brought with me NikhilKo’s book to recommend it. Almost none of them did know about it; I would imagine this is thanks to Microsoft Press (inexistent) presence outside of the states.
To summarize, it was great to met lots of developers working on such stuff and I just hoped that I helped to spread the custom controls love a bit… J