David Platt is some guy. Even after a lengthy session on the beers last night (it was hard not to, TechEd UK folks were here for a huge social gathering!), this session kept my attention right to the end…in fact, there could have been more of it and we’d all have been happy!

David talked about the BCL, performance, security, the garbage collector, generics, “out of band” (I forget what this was about, when I remember I’ll update this post), debugging, clickonce. He made a good job of this, the demo’s were short and sweet.

Given the title of this session and this blog post, you’d think I’d write more about what’s new in .NET 2.0…however some of David’s surrounding comments are worthy of being written about!

Cool quotes
David made reference to Moore’s Law:

Moore’s law is the empirical observation that at our rate of technological development, the complexity of an integrated circuit, with respect to minimum component cost will double in about 24 months.

He then went on to tell us about Platt’s Law:

It doesn’t matter how fast the hardware gets, the software guys will piss it away

David’s a great believer in “lowering the friction of the process, take software to the next level, write better code…make it easier to do it right and harder to do it wrong”, .NET 2.0 helps us realise this quote. “Laziness trumphs everything” – make it easy to do the good/required stuff, like security, and folks will do it. “The bar needs to be raised” All good stuff.

I found this next quote rather appealing:

Crap is conserved

Consider two piles of crap (think of crap code if that helps). Even if you reduce the amount of crap in one pile, it has to go somewhere, thus you simply move it to the other pile (or a new pile). The total amount of crap remains the same. Less crap “here”, means more crap somewhere else.

In a quick poll of the audience, “what language are you folks using?”, 85% percent replied with C#, the remainder using Visual Basic.net or another language. That’s a lot of C# developers…