Tim's space

For anyone in the Milton Keynes area, Simon Sabin is holding his first user group in this region on Thursday (26 Aug 2008).

 

More details are here:

 

 

 

 

The Beta SQL 2008 MCTS exams are now available.  You can take them for free by registering through Prometric/Vue and entering the following promotional codes:

 

71-452: Designing a Business Intelligence Infrastructure Using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 - Promotional Code: 3568C

71-450: PRO: Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Designing, Optimizing, and Maintaining a Database Administrative Solution - Promotional Code: 239F4

 

More details on Dan English's blog here: http://denglishbi.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!CD3E77E793DF6178!501.entry

 

 

Yesterdays VBUG meeting in Bracknell was very well received and we had some great feedback. Tim Hustler and Simon Sturgees gave a presentation on Silverlight and Visual Studio 2008. 

 

The demand for this event was quite amazing. We were fully subscribed and unfortunately had to turn down attendees. Tim and Simon were the winners of Microsoft's 'Be all you can be' challenge and their presentation focused on recreating the winning web site which is shown below.

 

Creative Jar's winning site
 

Simon began by describing how the controls were put together in Expression. This included an explanation on how the coloration, curves, shadows, gradients and fonts were designed. During the second part of the demo, Tim described how the controls were built including the logic behind the page and the track controls on the page. For me, it was very interesting seeing a designer at work and seeing the interaction between designer and developer. 

 

The source code for this event can be downloaded from the Creative Jar site below:

 

Well done to Tim and Simon for a great presentation and thanks also to Conchango and Michelle Flynn for supporting this meeting.   

 

For those wishing to attend the Microsoft UK ReMix08 conference in Brighton, 'The Register' have provided a discount code giving £50 off the £349 entrance price.

 

Simply enter the discount code XBs40dt when purchasing (case sensitive). More details can be found here:

 

 

Yesterday evening, Andrew Hallmark gave a great session on CSLA.Net and code generation. The title of the talk was named 'How to spend more time at the pub and other places'

 

The slides for the session can be found here:

 

 

CSLA is a business object framework created by Rockford Lhotka. During the first part of the session, Andrew described the main functionality offered by CLSA. CSLA provides CRUD functionality but also offers cancelled edits across parent/child objects (also known as n-level undo). Validation and business rules are associated with business objects making it very easy to add and create multiple UI's.

 

A big advantage of CSLA is that it provides a good framework for good practices. In the example given by Andrew, his company supports around 120 applications. Since everything is based upon the same underlying CSLA architecture, this standardisation provides excellent maintainability. 

 

By combining code generation and CSLA, a highly productive development environment can be achieved. The highlight of the presentation was a demonstration of how a music database application could be developed using codesmith and CSLA in less than 10 minutes!

 

An interesting development pointed out by Andrew is CSLA factory - a CSLA based tool that allows you to graphically draw a model and to have the code created for you.

 

The overall feedback for this event was excellent and I'm sure that all attendees are grateful for learning some great techniques for being more productive.