I spent hours looking over the session slides and, as is normal for any NFJS related conference, there are too many great sessions to go to them all. I am still up in the air on a few of the time slots because I just can’t decide yet. I am waiting to see if I want to follow a few threads deeply or just get the shallow details and move on to something else. I am really interested in Groovy and Grails tooling so I will definitely be hitting some sessions on STS. I also want to learn something about Roo… I’m just not sure whether I’ll make it all the way to the ‘advanced Roo’ session. Basically, I’ll be all over the board as far as session topics so I can’t really say there’s a theme for me.

I’ll add some postings to the blog in case anyone is interested in my opinions on the topics/sessions I attended.

All in all it was a good day. I attended 5 sessions and had some great conversations in between. There was only one session I wish I would have opted out of. It wasn’t really bad, but it wasn’t really about the kind of thing I was looking for. In the interest of not griping, I’ll keep that one to myself.

I attended 3 sessions by Neal Ford, the Meme Wrangler (‘Real World Agile’, ‘Pragmatic XP’, and ‘Test Driven Design’). I have to be honest… I have listened to several podcasts in which he was a participant, watched a video or two that he was in, and read many of his blog posts. I liked them all and had high expectations. He delivered. As I’ve said in previous blog posts, I’m not easily enamored with ‘experts’. But he gets his ideas across in a very clear and concise way. He’s doesn’t come across as preaching and he lays out his arguments very well. I would not hesitate to recommend him to anyone who wants to learn about topics like SD agility, dynamic languages, and his ‘polyglot’ programmer topics.

I was also very interested in the ‘Real World Test Driven Design’ session by Scott Davis.

It was a good session, but unfortunately for my rating of it, I had just attended Neal Ford’s ‘Test Driven Design’ session. It’s not that Scott Davis’s session was bad at all… it was just a lot of the same info. I would have no problem recommending it to anyone.

I got a lot of good info from all of the sessions today. I’m already sold on the NFJS conferences. There is something awesome about not having corporate sponsorship at a dev conference. No vendors trying to shove a product down your throat hidden in a free T-shirt, no sessions that end up being a 45 minute sales pitch. Its a great concept.

I plan on more blogging on the sessions, but I’m not going to spew the notes on them. Most of the speakers have the session slides publicly available on their websites so I’ll just link to them.

Until tomorrow….

I have always been a proponent of using surrogate, or blind, keys.  The reason is that I have faced scenarios where what is said to be an iron-clad rule about the business meaning associated with a primary key suddenly changes requiring the need to change that primary key – most DBs don’t handle this well.  It’s also cumbersome constructing joins on natural keys when they are composed of several columns.   With that said, I do see advantages to having real meaning attached to the fields used as a composite key.

What do you think?  Is this a matter of preference of the database designer or is there some rule or advantage that I don’t know of that would be a definite answer one way or another?

Here are a couple of articles to refer to for arguments.

http://www.bcarter.com/intsurr1.htm

http://searchsqlserver.techtarget.com/general/

 It should be back up later today.

First off, I’m going off of the things I have read – mostly blogger opinions. I’m not a lawyer so I’m sure they have a legal basis for their threats or they wouldnt do it. My opinions stem from the ‘spirit’ of giving software away for free, especially when it has a public API.

Personally, I’m OK with M$ wanting to limit plugins on their free software (VisualStudio Express), but they should have said so in their original VisualStudio Express EULA – unambiguously. How hard is it to say “You can’t create plugins that can be used in Visual Studio Express”? From what I have read, they have a pile of legal crap that says a bunch of jargon that means little or nothing to their audience. Sure, corporate lawyers might see ‘caution’ all over the place, but the guys/gals who are downloading VS Express probably take a gander or two and say “sweet” and move on. M$ is hurting their own supporters. Non M$ developers just look and giggle. M$ developers seem to be split into two camps (at least as the blogs indicate). One camp says “M$ has a right to be ticked and this guy should cease and desist”. The other is somewhat incredulous to the whole issue – amazed that MS is picking on one of their own MVPs and wondering what this all means.

To me, I feel for the guy, but on the other hand he was working with a ‘closed’ platform. This kind of behavior from M$ may, at a minimum, help convince a few developers of the goodness of open platforms.

Look, I’m OK with any company trying to make a buck and protect their intellectual property in the process. But releasing a free public version of a product with a public API and then threatening legal action for using the public API for FREE product creation using the public API without specifically stating the limitation of plugin creation using the API in the EULA just seems wrong (Did that make any sense?). Not to mention this is one of their own previously recognized elite.

Not everybody can be a FOSS supporter. I am. This is hopefully another example of why FOSS and the licenses that go along with it are good things.

Java is entrenched in the FOSS community. It has taken a while to get to where it is now, but its in a good place. For all the .Net developers, I think this is a shame.

I’m probably over simplifying the whole issue, but that’s the way it seems to me. I’m sure the lawyers see it differently.