Application Coach
Just getting back from PASS summit where I was trying to help out the teams competing in the application development shootout. A bunch of us from the SQL team have been doing shifts as “Application Coaches”, where we are supposed to be experts in the various technologies the teams need to build the application.
I had an hour, and only helped out one team. The team I helped had already been helped by Markand Arpanearlier in the day, and they were manually wiring up their Web UI to data using low-tech old-school technique of setting properties directly. I helped a bit with some ADO.NET and Web Forms stuff, and they were making great progress when I left.
On the other hand, none of us there could figure out how to help the two teams who were attempting to get ASP.NET databinding to work. Get the “hard way” working in ten minutes, and forty minutes of debugging fails to get the “easy way” working. It has to be something simple…