When: Tuesday 13th November 2007, doors open 6:00pm, meeting starts 6:30pm
Where: UWE (University of the West of England), Frenchay, Bristol (see FAQ for directions and a map) - Room 2q48 (in Q block)
What: ADO.NET Entity Framework and Microsoft Codename "Astoria"
Who: James Winters and Guy Smith-Ferrier
Why: Because ADO.NET has been missing a schema definition solution since its inception and the ADO.NET Entity Framework is long overdue. Also because all data solutions are aimed at server-side processing. Client side code (such as AJAX, Silverlight and XBAPs) have no data story and need one to avoid expensive page refreshes from the server. Astoria provides a client-side data access story.
How do I sign up for this meeting: Send an email to meetings at dotnetdevnet.com and quote your user name and the November meeting.
Abstract for ADO.NET Entity Framework:
The Entity Framework is way more than just another ORM, it is an extremely flexible way to interact with any persistence store. Although it's not shipping with Orcas, it will be available some time in early 2008 and you need to get to grips with it. In this session I'll examine the framework and show you how to get to grips with it.
Abstract for Microsoft Codename "Astoria"
The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies has brought new opportunities and caused us to solve old problems in new ways. AJAX and Silverlight applications need read/write access to data and business objects without performing full page refreshes and without dumbing down the data so much we are just left with primitives. Microsoft's answer to this problem is Microsoft Codename "Astoria". In short "Astoria" is a data access layer for client-size technologies such as AJAX and Silverlight. This session shows how it works, how you can write "Astoria" data servers and how you can customize "Astoria" to your applications requirements.
Biographies (James Winters bio to follow shortly):-
Guy is an MVP in ASP.NET. He is the author of ".NET Internationalization" published by Addison-Wesley (http://www.dotneti18n.com). He is a Microsoft Certified Professional developer, author, trainer and speaker, has spoken at many European and US conferences, is the winner of the NxtGen Best Presentation 2006/2007, has been voted best speaker three times and is an INETA Speaker. He runs The .NET Developer Network (http://www.dotnetdevnet.com), a free .NET user group in the South West of England. He is the author of C#/.NET courseware and much of the official Borland courseware including courses on COM and ADO. He has written over 50 articles for numerous magazines, has co-authored an application development book and is the author of the ADO chapter of "Mastering Delphi 6". You can read his blog at http://www.guysmithferrier.com.