CMAP Code Camp

del.icio.us Tags: BI,LINQ,WPF

The Central Maryland Association of .Net Professionals held their third Code Camp event in Columbia, MD on Saturday, April 12th and the event was outstanding! I attended the event along with several of the AIS Columbia staff. I got to see several valuable sessions including:

• Introduction to WPF by Mark Lindell - Mark provided a primer on the value and issues involved with eXtensible Application Markup Language (XAML - pronounced 'zam-el'). The presentation was heavily influenced by Adam Nathan's great book on the topic: Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed.
• Applied Business Intelligence by Tom Snider - Tom's session really served to clarify some of my thinking around dimensional analysis and data modeling as well as introduce me the to cube generation tools in Visual Studio 2005/SQL Server 2005. These tools are quite powerful. I wonder what SQL Server 2008 has in store for us in terms of Business Intelligence?
• Introduction to LINQ by Scott Allen - This broad survey of the various LINQ (Language INtegrated Query) flavors focused on those that are of primary interest to the majority of developers: objects, SQL, XML, and Entities. One of the best tidbits to come from this session was a recommendation for a free utility called LINQPad. With this tool I can now write a LINQ expression against a live database, execute the command and even translate my code to the equivalent TSQL command for comparison! This utility is initially a little confusing without the accompanying book from the author, but after reviewing a lot of other online resources the sample code included in the utility made a lot more sense.
• LINQ to SQL in an N-Tiered Application by Steve Michelotti - Steve composed a rather ambitious presentation covering a lot of ground on LINQ to SQL. He built (with snippets) a data entry application that manipulated contact information. I found the closing section on migrating from the default SQL generation mode to SQL Stored Procedures the most enlightening. It now seems reasonable to use LINQ for this purpose, but Steve also pointed out a lot of potential traps in child collections that I need to investigate further in order to fully grok. Too much for 1.25 hours!