The Atlanta .NET User Group meeting was pretty good tonight. Aside from the technical details, I also saw a number of old faces there I had not see in a while. I really need to go to more of these meetings. I always learn so much just by attending and seeing what people are doing.
Matt Ranlett, of DevCow fame was there. Matt is always working with the Atlanta MS Professionals group and is working with Sharepoint. See his Sharepoint 123 series at http://www.atlantamspros.com/Events/SharePoint123/tabid/76/Default.aspx
Matt was there along side Keith Rome, who now runs the Atlanta Cuttige Edge group, which is the "resurrection of the Atlanta C# group" according to http://www.atlantace.org. Keith is an extremely well accomplished .NET consultant who maintains a blog at: http://www.mindfusioncorp.com/weblog/
Anyway, about tonight's meeting: you can see the agenda here: http://www.atlantadotnet.org/
The first part was about robotics and .NET, including a demo of a remote controlled car. That was pretty cool.
Closer to home though was Eric Engler's presentation about .NET 2.0 Architecture.
At the 1,000 foot level he covered two main approaches to application architecture:
n-Tier model and ORM model.
He presented slides that illustrated the pros and cons of these models, though to me there is not a complete distiction these days. There tends to be a hybrid approach in many cases.
In his definition, n-Tier involved a full BLL and DAL that worked together top to bottom, while he classified the ORM model as involving database layer mediation/obfuscation through mapping files and automatic SQL generation at run time.
He said in his experience n-tier was better for larger scale applications spanning multiple databases and systems, but took longer up front to implement, while ORM was quicker to get up and running and could be good for turning out systems quickly, but could become too dependent upon specialized knowledge in the long run to be maintainable.
He reiterated that in pragmatic terms, there usually is a hyrbid approach.
His presentation slides and sample core are available here:
http://www.EricEngler.com/Presentations.aspx
Next week, he will give a talk about ASP.NET AJAX in Alpharetta as well at the Atlanta Cutting Edge Technologies group mentioned above.
ASP.NET AJAX - Beyond the UpdatePanel
This is scheduled for March 5, 2007 at the Atlanta Cutting Edge User Group
Topics will include:
* the parts of the AJAX Distribution
* UpdatePanel - a brief obligatory overview
* the ScriptManager
* AJAX Control Toolkit: design of server-side control extenders and custom controls
* BLOCKED SCRIPT how to use objects in a non-OOP language
* AJAX Client Library: micro sized version of the .NET Framework written in JavaScript
* ASP.NET AJAX Application Services
* calling Web Services from the Client
* Debugging AJAX applications
This upcoming book is the suggested reference: Professional ASP.NET AJAX