Jeffrey Richter Did Come To Town

Told ya he was coming. Yesterday I had an opportunity to meet Jeffrey Richter who I regard as the ultimate geek (in a good way). His one day training in advanced .NET topics was a hit! Over the past couple of years I've been to a lot of Microsoft events, but only once or twice did they delve into advanced topics. Jeffrey's presentation beat the pants off them all.

If you have a chance to attend his In-Depth .NET Framework class I highly recommend you do so. Do yourself and others a favor, though. This is not a 101 level class. Neither is it a QnA session per se. You need to have at least some experience in multithreading, serialization, reflection, etc. Such notions as thread pool thread, mutex, reader/writer lock, delegate, etc, should not be new to you. You don't want to find yourself sitting there trying to figure out what the heck is going on. It would be ideal if you had had developed multithread applications in C++ before. When it comes to multithreading, Jeffrey is the guy.

I won't say developing multithreaded applications is easy, but I enjoyed it. Jeffrey's books and MSDN articles made is much easier.

It was very insightful to learn how much implementation of multithreading got screwed up in .NET. A bunch of plain embarrassing screw-ups right from the outset. Luckily, a lot of these things will be fixed in version 2.0, and much credit for this goes to Jeffrey.

My only regret is we didn't get to some really interesting topics from the slide deck. Oh well, maybe some other time. ;)

This is what I looked like (I'm in an orange shirt) before I stepped outside and got soaking wet.

P.S. If I could also meet Matt Pietrek some day my geek life would be complete.