Although he only talked about high-level stuff (Exception Handling and Memory Management), I think Brad did a pretty good job. I stopped going to the Microsoft office out here because of all the 100 level classes, I couldn't justify taking time out of the trenches for learning stuff I already knew. But hearing the lead PM on the CLR team speak? It was time to attend my first Houston .NET UG meeting. To be fair, there was also the Hal-PC C# sig there, but I've never seen that room so packed. Overflow rooms had to be set up. Way to go, Brad!

So as is usually the case with these events, I came away with a couple of golden nuggets of information, some of which is even relevant in v1.x of the framework! (Imagine that!) Here are a couple of the notes I took:

• Finalizers keep objects alive an order of magnitude (about 10) longer than objects w/o finalizers
• It's a really bad idea to throw an Exception from a finalizer.
• Check out Critical Finalizers in v2.0
• Finalizers are most appropriate for owned unmanaged resources (filestream, sqlconnection, etc classes are a case in point)
• It's kind of an "unwritten rule" that any object that has a Close method should implement the IDisposable pattern and they should do the exact same thing. i.e. Close should just call Dispose.

I brought my digital camera, but being the jerk that I am, didn't check to see if the batteries were working first (doh!). Thankfully, I've got a camera phone and was able to take a picture with Brad anyways (I'm the short one):

This is also where I got my Channel 9 guy along with a nice smattering of other cool swag. Sorry, Scoble, it was just a joke tho - I thought it would be more appropriate to write the ransom note in 1337 than have both of my subscribers download a bunch of newspaper-clipped letter images. I still want my million, tho 😃

[ Currently Playing : Napoleon Solo - At the Drive-In - In Casino Out (4:47) ]