We have some great meetings lined up for the next few months. Please take a look at the upcoming schedule on the web site.
Reflection is a powerful (and dangersous) tool available to .NET developers. In this talk I will show you a nice technique that you could use to save cojnfiguration (or any) data in your projects.
Meeting Overview: PhillyDotNet marked its 5th anniversary celebration by packing out the house at Microsoft’s Great Valley Corporate Center Office. Nine presenters gave 15 minute sessions covering one of their favorite .NET topics. A standing room only crowd enjoyed the hospitality of Agility Systems (PhillyDotNet founder Bill Wolff’s company) which provided subs, chips, cookies, sodas and an anniversary cake in adherence to Bill’s favorite and mandatory policy: FREE! Below is a brief if not woefully inadequate synopsis of each talk.
Presenter: Dani Diaz, eTech Solutions Fun with Reflection
Overview: Ah reflection, that little piece of magic that reveals to us what is in our assembly. Dani utilized some demo code he had to drive home the possibilities that reflection can provide us. Reflection allows us to get information about an assembly’s types. We can then instantiate these types and, believe it or not we can even generate assemblies on the fly. Have fun using .GetTypes, .GetProperties, etc. but be careful, you will take a hit. Instead of using it repeatedly, load it up and store it for use during later operations.
Links:
Presenter: Marc Ziss, ZConsulting Microsoft AJAX for ASP.NET
Overview: Anyone responsible for Pub Night can’t be all bad, and Marc proved just how slick he was at Ajax. Turns out Atlas is actually made up of three parts: 1) Ajax Extensions for ASP.NET 1.0 Beta2, 2) Ajax Control Toolkit, 3) Ajax Futures CTP (Nov). Marc showed us how the Update Panel will allow refresh of just its contents without doing a full post back of the page. Pretty cool! Not only that, since you don’t have a clue how the Update Panel is progressing we also can use an Update Progress control. So use it as is or override, you just got more bang for your buck!
Presenter: Mark Magliocco, Consultant Live.Com Maps
Overview: Where in the world is Mark Magliocco? Now that he’s harnessed the power of the Virtual Earth Map Control (V4) it could be literally anywhere. Include a free controllable map in your next web site without bending over backwards! You can scroll around, include your ‘what and ‘where’ criteria, locate places with standard pushpins or customized pins…which begs the questions, ”what’s Mark not telling us about the skull and crossbones”. Download and reference the JS object and with the amazing interactive SDK site, you’ll be wowing your customers in no time.
Links: http://markm.com/markm/index.htm,http://markm.com/markm/philly_dotnet_2006_1121/Live_map_control.pdf
Presenter: Andy Schwam, Diamond Technologies ASP.NET Master Pages
Overview: Master your web page development with Master Pages. Instead of slides, Andy developed a web site utilizing the components of his talk. Create a Master Page, create a Content page and reference its Master to see the grayed out Master around the Content’s design. Have nested Masters for save private and public access. Of course, if you do, you won’t be able to see it in the design pane. Hint, you could always set the Master page in the Page_PreInit (note: Page_Load wouldn’t work). Andy also showed us how you can interact between the Master and Content pages to truly become the master of your domain!
Presenter: Rob Keiser, Row-5 Systems J# ZIP Classes
Overview: Need a little zip in your life? Rob showed us a very cool trick to create our own zips without having to buy anything. Reference: vjslib.dll, Namespace: java16, java.util.zip, Distribution: j# runitime lib. Note: Must compile for x86 to run on 64bit. Why not just shell out another free zip product…that’s fine but they needed a lot more information than what would be available doing that. Why not compressed folders? Compressed folders were ~ 25% compression and zipping this way was ~90%. So far transferring ~ 5 gigs / night is working without any problems. Rob used ZipGenius 6 to look at the zips.
Links: http://www.row-5.com/
Presenter: Peter Laudati, Microsoft Whirlwind Tour of .NET 3.0 Framework
Overview: Peter is a Microsoft Dev-Evangelist. His actual area is supposed to be something like North Jersey/New York but for more than a year now he’s been covering our area. Peter talked about all the events coming up and stuff coming out. And by the way, .NET 3.0 is here! Don’t worry about downloading it, it’s just .NET 2.0 with stuff (Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, and Windows CardSpace).
Links: http://blogs.msdn.com/peterlau/, http://www.netfx3.com/
Presenter: Kevin Goff, Common Ground Solutions C# Topics from Recent Talks
Overview: Kevin must know what time management is, because he’s been in high demand. Kevin covered at the 2000 ft level what he’s been speaking on in Devteach, code camps and user group meetings. From SQL 2000 to 2005 code, Kevin made it look easy. He also covered generics in his talk. In his estimation Carl Franklin’s (you know, www.dotnetrocks.com) definition for generics was probably the best simple explanation he’s heard…no I didn’t get it so call Carl up in New London, CT if you want it. It was something like ‘if you have a number of methods that mainly only differ by the object(s) they receive you may have a good candidate for generics’. How’s that for butchering the thing? Kevin has a great book out that you got to check out! Pro VS 2005 Reporting using SQL Server and Crystal Reports
Links: http://www.commongroundsolutions.net/, http://www.amazon.com/Reporting-using-Server-Crystal-Reports/dp/1590596889
Presenter: Mitch Ruebush, INGDirect Free Developer Tools
Overview: Mitch shows us just what it means to be a MVP. In addition to the heavy work-load he carries at INGDirect he scours the globe for the tools we love most (FREE!) Mitch referenced and/or gave a short show and tell of the following (and oh yeah, Sysinternals is now MS):
Presenter: Bill Wolff, Agility Systems philly.net Past, Present, Future
Overview: Kudos and congratulations to Bill! It’s been 5 years and PhillyDotNet has been an invaluable resource for knowledge transfer, networking and collaboration for the area’s IT development professionals. Bill talked about the past and then shared upcoming plans for meetings, code camps, pub nights, and web site transition to SharePoint.
Links: http://www.businessagility.net/, http://www.phillydotnet.org