Upcoming Events
View our previous events.WPF / MVVM / Entity Framework in Visual Studio 2010
3/24/2010 6:00:00 PM
Location: Nebraska Book Company - 5240 S. 19th Street
WinForms have been good to us over the ages. In the world of rich media, however, WinForms falls flat. They do not have the aesthetic appeal we’re looking for in graphically appealing applications. Windows Presentation Foundation has allowed us to go to a whole new level by providing tools for developing powerful, easy to customize applications. In this presentation, Brian Swiger will give you an overview of the features of WPF and the tools in Visual Studio 2010 RC. He will discuss why you might want to consider using WPF for your next client application. We will also examine the Model-View-ViewModel design pattern used in formulating WPF applications, including a brief introduction to the integration and leveraging of the Entity Framework as an Object-relational mapper. This discussion is focused towards people with no WPF experience.
The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)
4/28/2010 6:00:00 PM
Location: Nebraska Book Company - 5240 S. 19th Street
Composable applications are made of building blocks – like Legos. Composability is an extension of many ideas that have fueled architecture evolution in the last twenty years, including isolation, the creation of tiers, and testable applications. Silverlight and .NET now contain the Managed Extensibility Framework or MEF to provide composability. MEF is available in .NET 3.5 and Silverlight 3.0 via downloads and in the box for .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0. In the first part of this talk, I’ll cover what composability is and the three broad categories – extensions, fully composed applications, and architecturally composed applications. The second part of the talk dives into the technical aspects of MEF and how to use it. MEF itself is fully extensible with many possible models for defining composition parts. I’ll skip the theoretical approaches and stick with the mainstream attributed model. You’ll learn how to incorporate this attributed model into your own applications to define and retrieve parts. The end of the talk will briefly cover the challenges of debugging MEF, including an introduction to stable composition and its implications. You’ll leave understanding when MEF might be a good fit for your applications today and insight into how profoundly MEF is likely to change architectures in the relatively near future.
Speaker: Kathleen Dollard
Kathleen Dollard is a consultant, author, trainer, and speaker. She’s been a Microsoft MVP for over ten years and has spoken about .NET in 28 states and 5 countries. She’s written dozens of articles including the “Ask Kathleen” column in Visual Studio Magazine. She also wrote “Code Generation in Microsoft .NET” (Apress). Her passion is helping programmers be smarter in how they develop by learning to better use .NET languages, libraries and platforms. She works with WPF, WF, as well as core technologies including System.AddIn. She’s currently creating template infrastructure for code generation using VB XML literals. After working on the problem of capturing business intent in metadata and test definitions for years, she’s working with industry improvements in these areas. She’s also working on full life cycle improvements, such as unit testing, better debugging and static analysis (FxCop). When not working, she enjoys woodworking, snowshoeing, and kayaking depending on the outdoor temperature.