Yesterday DotNED(erland), the Dutch .net user group, celebrated its first aniversary with a great meeting. To me it was quite a journey as the meeting was in Delft at the HQ of The Vision Web but it was worth it. It is a beautifull location and Michiel is quite a hoster. The long train ride gave me the opportunity to finish the Longhorn “book“ (more on that later).
Dino Esposito spoke to an audience of almost 100 people on the internals of aspx pages. Dino is a good a speaker as he is a writer. His material was enough for 6 hours, after an hour and a half he had to be stopped. After a very clear story on the lifecycle of a page, from an http request to the html produced by the C# object generated by the asp.net engine. He focused on problems with the viewstate of controls added from code. The slides and samples will be available on the DotNED site.
Peter Hellers followed with a very clear session on http modules and handlers. A good overview, nice samples which demonstrated the idea in just a couple of lines resulting in a good demo. Installing handlers requires you to do some IIS administration. Does anybody know if there is a possibilty to do that from code ? You can administer the COM+ catalog using automation, is there something likewise for IIS administration ? (Yes I know, RTFgoogle..)
Astrid Hackenberg, a well known trainer/coach from Class-a concluded the afternoon with a session on ado.net. She demonstrated how to use an xsd schema to validate your data before posting it to the database. Her application read the schema from disk and used the DataSet class. Personally I do prefer importing the schema in vs.net to generate a typed dataset. My way does provide with more checks at compile time, her way is far more flexible. Recently I had been exploring this territory as well and wrote an article on it which will be republished by MSDNAA.
Afterwards we could chat and mingle. I was sorry to have to leave early (to arrive home late..). Quite soon there will be another meeting, looking forward to that.
<Dutch>Doorgaan !!!</Dutch>