ParaTechnica

WI-INETA - August 12th: ASP.NET MVC with Jeffrey Palermo

dankline — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 23:51:24 GMT

With my vacation approaching next week, I've been distracted from my efforts with DevForce EF. Unfortunately, my RC1 licence timed out which required an uninstall and reinstall of the product. Apparently, they are working on improvements to the licensing in the future, and the need to uninstall and reinstall will not be required. For now though, it was just enough of a hurdle to keep me from making progress. I'll pick up the pieces again in Mid August when I return from vacation.

On a more interesting note, On August 12th, 2008 the Wisconsin DotNet Users Group, WI-INETA.org will be sponsoring a presentation on the ASP.NET MVC. For my SE Wisconsin friends, this is definitely a presentation to catch. If you aren't familiar with Model View Controller, this is a great time to get your feet wet. MVC is a pattern that ASP.NET developers will be seeing a lot more of. By definition, it separates the model, the view, and the controller which lends itself perfectly to n-tier applications and test driven development. To sign up for the event, visit the WI-INETA.org site.

The demos will be based on the CodePlex MVCContrib Project and the MVC Preview. You may want to download and play with the preview prior to the presentation.

You can view Jeff's blog here.

If time permits, I'll review some of the key highlights of the meeting in August.

DevForce EF RC1 and other notes

dankline — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 23:30:00 GMT

First a short note, but not really an apology. I've been a bit busy lately. Have you ever had one of those days where you stumble across a technology and you know you have a good handle on it, but when you try to bring it into focus, you just can't wrap your head around it. I had a few of those recently. The result, for me, was a commitment to spend some "back-to-the-basics' time. I frequently comment on how hard it can be to keep up in application development tools and technologies today. When you go back and fast forward, you can get a good understanding of why that pace seems so relentless. It's been demanding, challenging and (no I'm not crazy) fun. If you haven't done a refresher in a few years, I encourage you to rewind and replay. Challenge yourself to test the depth of what you think you know. For me, the icing on the cake was the number of pieces of the puzzle on which I had a hazy grasp, that now, years of experience later, seem embarrassingly obvious. I'm going to continue pushing myself through the refresher for a bit longer and I encourage you to try the same. My hope that my improved understanding of the fundamentals will help provide more depth in the quality of the reviews and examples you will see here in the future. If you notice any errors, misconceptions, or would like to expand on an idea, please leave a comment.

Now for the real point of the blog. Good to their promise, IdeaBlade has published the release candidate of the DevForce Entity Framework. I've just installed it and will be working through the videos and tutorials. If you'd like to download and get your hands on this product, click the image of their web site. After I get a few bloody knuckles, I'll be looking forward to a real test of the product and it's capabilities. If you'd like to propose a project, leave a comment. I prefer solving real problems. I find they introduce challenges that I would never have seen until confronted with a real problem-space. I love the excitement of the unseen curve and putting the tool through its paces and accelerating out of the curve to the finish line. I hope you'll ride along and that you enjoy the ride. Keep you're reader tuned (yep, probably best to use the RSS feed to be notified of future postings). I hope to have some initial observations and evaluations of the new DevForce soon. See you then.

Technorati Tags: DevForce EF,ORM,Visual Studio,Entity Framework.

DevForce EF (Beta 1)

dankline — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 02:51:00 GMT

I had a call from John Douglas at IdeaBlade yesterday. He was actually following up on a previous call. These folks are very enthusiastic about their product and are very helpful. Unlike the last time he called, this time I followed his recommendation and visited the resource site for their Beta : http://www.ideablade.com/DevForceEF_summary.html. The result of the visit is that I am even more impressed by the company and the product. With the release of the Entity Framework approaching, it creates some real questions for those of us who are using ORM mapping tools. To their credit, IdeaBlade has made the decision to abandon the overlap in functionality between their product and the Entity Framework. This allows them to focus on the "value-add" to the EF functionality rather than competition, and to work on "seamless" integration with Visual Studio and the EF. Apparently, they have found a way to extend the EF functionality without leaving a footprint in the Framework files and mappings. What this means, is that any application that is designed to work with EF, will continue to work with EF as if their tool was not present. I think this sets a new standard in "tool etiquette" for tools and add-ons for the Visual Studio IDE. As developers, we shouldn't have to waste energy resolving conflict between tools in the toolset ... (though I'm sure many have). Add-ons should extend our tools, not change them.

Watch the video and give it your full attention. There are some great discussions of caching (server and client side) , concurrency, and the challenges of working with data in the real world. I think you'll find the discussions well worth the investment of time. I'm looking forward to spending some time with the tool. According to John, the release candidate should be available shortly. Watch their site for the announcement so that you can get a copy of the tool that closely resembles the final release. I think this tool will be in my tool chest. Take a look and come back and let me know what you think.