Houston C# SIG Meeting – 07/15/08 – Recap

I attended both the Beginning C# and C# Special Interest Group meetings tonight.  The meetings were held at the Microsoft Houston office rather than the normal HAL-PC office and in my opinion had a much better turnout.  There were about 25-28 in attendance for the Beginning C# and an additional 15-20 showed up for the regular C# (Total ~45).

The Beginning C# SIG topic was Classes and Interfaces.  Bobby Schaffer gave a great overview and followed by stepping through a console application that performed banking calculations.

The speaker for the C# SIG was J Sawyer and the topic was ASP.NET Dynamic Data.  Wikipedia defines ASP.NET Dynamic Data as follows:  "ASP.NET Dynamic Data is a web application scaffolding framework from Microsoft, shipped as an extension to ASP.NET, that can be used to build data driven web applications. It exposes tables in a database by encoding it in the URI of the ASP.NET web service, and the data in the table is automatically rendered to HTML. The process of rendering can be controlled using custom design templates. Internally, it discovers the database schema by using the database metadata."

Below is an overview of what was discussed.

• Dynamic Data is new with Visual Studio 2008 SP1
• LINQ is fast from a read perspective.  Not so much from a write perspective.
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data allows a developer to quickly build a data driven website
• Dynamic Data will only work with LINQ to SQL
• Data model metadata/validation

J went through some great examples in which he built a Dynamic Data web site containing a maintenance grid.  The grid was editable and was created with little to no code.  He also went over the importance of server-side validation as well as several aspects of security.

All in all, it was a great meeting and a great turnout.  I honestly hope the move to the Microsoft office is permanent.

C# SIG Presentation – Slides and Demo