What .NET topics have seemed so daunting to you that you have gone out of your way to avoid them?
One of the sessions that I am doing at the Spring Connections conferences is called “Five (Supposedly) Scary Things About .NET (that don't have to be)”. I can actually think of more than five, but given that it is a 75 minute session, I am already pushing it with only 15 minutes to devote per topic.
The topics I am tackling are
- Declarative Programming with Attributes
- Reflection
- Delegates (which I think is the A#1 most difficult thing for VB6 developers to grok when moving to .NET)
- Threading
- Code Access Security
These are among the topics that I personally had the hardest time getting comfortable with when I moved to .NET. The challenge wasn't always that the concept was too difficult to understand, but that I just thought it would be and simply avoided it. I am still no expert on any one of these topics, but I am definitely comfortable and work with all of them at some level when I am programming. I remember sitting at Borders when .NET first came out, pulling out every .NET book they had, going to the index to find “Delegates“ and then reading what the author had to say. I finally found a explanation that spoke to me in Matthew MacDonald's “The Book of VB.NET“ and brought that book home with me. I also sat in on advanced sessions about reflection at a conference when there were no beginner sessions - hoping to get an inkling of what on earth reflection even was.
I think every developer should know enough about threading to understand how to avoid common threading issues that we may cross paths with even if we aren't writing complicated multi-threaded applications. Or know enough about attributes to recognize that you are in a situation that would benefit from using them. At that point, you can then dig deeper.
One book that I will be recommending to attendees of my session is Building Applications and Components with Visual Basic .NET by Ted Pattison. It isn't a "drag & drop your way to software" tome. Instead, it dives into the core pieces of .NET without getting too deeply into the plumbing to give you real understanding of these important building blocks of .NET that will truly make you a better programmer. It's not a .NET 2.0 book, but that's not important.