Drinking From a Firehose

It's hardly a novel metaphor, but it can be an apt one. Last Monday and Tuesday I sat in a darkened room at the Microsoft campus being indoctrinated, along with 50 or 60 others, in the way of WPF and Silverlight (XAMLFest - there's a name). The primary developer/presenter also wanted to show us the value of the M-V-VM pattern, and of course it was all done using CS2008 and Expression Studio. As someone who is just now struggling to learn enough of the .NET way to port a Classic .ASP site/web app to ASP.NET and (probably) LINQ, it was quite a heady experience. Add to that the fact that all the coding was done in C#, and I've been (except for a foray into Python a few years back) strictly a VB guy, and I frequently found myself largely lost. Still, I came out with an appreciation for Microsoft's seriousness in making a major chunk of the user experience available through WPF portable to RIA's (Rich Internet Applications, for the TLA-deficient) while asking developers and designers to learn a minimum of new/different techniques. I may even come up with a use for some of that spiffy Silverlight presentation-layer stuff in my day job as a Business Intelligence analyst, in the form of custom visualizations - we'll see.

Now I'm getting ready to fly to Las Vegas for a TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute) conference. Four days of getting my head filled with Data Warehousing goodness. After years of learning to think relationally to the point that, when someone comes to me with a question or problem I automatically start writing SQL, I'm going to (hopefully) learn to think dimensionally. I've dipped my toes in the water a few times and I'm intrigued by the promise of power and fluidity. But I have a feeling I'm going to find myself once again trying to sip from a two-inch nozzle from which that enticingly-cool water is spraying with enough force to knock me over. I think I'll get a drink, but I'm likely to be drenched and exhausted when it's done.

Salut!