[DotGNU]Conference Report from "Using Portable.Net"

[Adam Ballai]

On September 30th I had made my way to Silicon Valley, CA to discuss DotGNU's 
Portable.Net.  It was a bleek and stormy day, I saw lots of proprietary 
software venders.  Actually it was quite nice out, but inside there was blood 
to be spilled.  

On with the reality of the situation, I went to a couple talks on different 
topics, one was about web service integration into existing network 
architectures.  The guy from Best Buy did a nice talk on the complexity issue 
with having no centralization and having to have services talk to services in 
which they in return talk back on services.  I think "web service hell" was 
just created in their situation >_<  So a few more real world situations like 
Amazon who released an api to other businesses to hook in with their 
database.  Excellent example of how webservices can work well with 
inter-business relationships instead of internal work like best buy.  

I only stuck around for another hour at the conference that day because I 
needed to work on the presentation a bit more and get some rest.   So I 
attended one called "Smart Devices in the Enterprise".  This guy was a total 
MS evanglist, I could smell it =)  So he brings out a couple toys showing off 
tablet pc's running Windows XP tablet edition and such.  His main goal was to 
get across how easy integrating hand recognition and pen drawing classes into 
your existing applications.  I'd have to agree with him, makes like a little 
less complicated.  I had a short one to one talk with him about the binaries 
compiled from the compact .net compiler working on both platforms, he said 
"sometimes".  So it comes to my conclusion that we should have some sort of 
alternative for hand recognition and hook up the pen control to our drawing 
library.  This doesn't take much except a volunteer =)  I looked at 
xscribble, and its very possible to use their code for the recognition with a 
PInvoke wrapper.

Neat thing about the hand recognition class is it will do I18N conversion for 
you.
// Translates the data to the current language set.
String str = handRecogData.ToString();

The next day I went off early and jumped in the ASP.NET with mono conference.  
Derek Ferguson had done a great job with that.  Explained the simplicity of 
developing with a .net alternative on a free platform(GNU/Linux).  

At about 3pm, I did the conference on pnet.  Explained the engine as best as I 
could with some questions I would have to redirect to Rhys =)  I don't think 
they quite understood CVM at first, but they got it after a few questions. 
Showed off a couple things that were great about developing with cscc, such 
as its interface being similar to gcc and the manpages were very thorough.  
For the java developers in the room and a few people who use nant, I showed 
the crowd csant and its similarities to Ant.  They liked =)  They were kind 
bewildered by Gopal's brainfuck webservice and it got a little excitement out 
of the crowd. Thanks Gopal! Winforms were then showed off, but ran a little 
slow on the laptop more then expected >_<  They liked Simon's PAIRS 
application as well, thanks Simon! Theres lots more explained, but I can't 
remember all of them and a few things came out of their questions asked.  The 
audience was very down to earth.  The patent question.  I simply stated that 
pnet core development wasn't under the United States.  Other questions arose 
that were more philosophical, is security better on an open source platform 
then a closed one.  I simply had take the time to explain that white hats 
won't be looking at closed source because its closed =)  I also expressed 
that its up to the administrator to patch his software as fast as possible, 
because its mostly script kiddies with root kits out there that get you from 
non-updated software.  In the end we're running this inside a virtual machine 
so you gotta get by that too =)

In the next hour I explained DotGNU's other parts as best I could.  DGEE, 
phpGroupware, and areas where I could sidetracked in a discussion about pnet 
again =)  They wanted to see more about DGEE, but I didn't have internet 
access like I thought I would, oh well.  Next year!  All in all, good 
conference their for us, too bad the audience wasn't more then 10-15 people.

Afterwards, we got a compliment about our goal, in portability on all of our 
fronts, from David White of Microsoft.  Thanks David!

In short, we're on track =) but we were on the .Net track on conferences.  
Maybe a DotGNU track one day!


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Regards,
Adam Ballai
The Front Networks