Yesterday, I had an opportunity to speak with a local company at their annual engineering conference. It is really nice to see companies that provide these types of training and opportunities for their staff. From talking to the attendees it sounded like the week long conference was something that they looked forward to and found extremely valuable. In working with the organizers I could certainly tell that they had spent a lot of time and thought in putting together this event.

The subject of my talk was about .NET development and the architecture changes involved. Like many companies they had invested heavily into the development of both VB 6 and ASP application. They were actively engaged in deciding how they would migrate that application forward to the .NET platform. My talk focused on explaining not only the fundamental language changes but the architectural shift that was involved. Visual Studio 2003 and partners provide some great tools that help migrate, VB 6 and ASP applications forward. These are purely code level migrations. Many times what people miss is that even though the code moves, you aren’t getting the full benefit of the .NET platform. Fundamentally, the shift to the Services Oriented Architecture means a different application development mindset. In order to fully leverage the architectural paradigm shift and full power of .NET, it is essential that developers and architects approach applications with these expanded concepts in mind.

For those interested, I have posted the deck as a PDF that you can download.

10:52:45 PM