Day 1 continued - Usability, CSS, Agile coding & SQL tuning, evening presentations

Sandy Clark presented a very detailed demonstration on CSS and specifically using the Floating features to position text on the screen. The content was helpful, but overwhelming in quantity. Thankfully, I think she has documented the majority of it on her website at shayna.com. It will be worth looking at in the future. (I am attending a similar session on absolute positioning now and the information isn't particularly relevant to my server side work, but informative).

A late afternoon session Agile CF: Delivering Apps in Less Time had great potential. In the 20 minutes I stomached the presentation the speaker spoke generically about techniques like using source control (subversion), unit testing, integration testing, etc. I felt that the session was missing out on examples (either demos or personal anecdotes about finishing projects faster by using a particular tool (and then demonstrating how to use that too/technique). I ended up walking out to attend the last half of a far better presentation on SQL Server performance tuning.

The SQL presentation fit my needs much better and from the audience reaction they too appeared to be happier. The speaker, Jeremy Kadlec talked about specific techniques for tuning including using the DBCC Reindex, sp_reconfigure and other built in admin tools. He showed screen captures from the query profiler tools, loads on the server, etc. I didn't catch a URL, but he refered to someone by the name of Selene Bainum who has examples to speed performance. A quick search shows that this woman is a speaker here this week and has written a number of articles for CFDJ, MM, etc.