Yesterday, november 25th, Dutch user group dotned had a meeting hosted by DTS in Meppel. Which is in the Northern part of the country. Nice for me but for the most of my fellow Dutch .net-ers it was an occasion for a favorite hobby over here : complaining about the traffic. In the Netherlands travelling more than 2 hours is considered to much. Most people arrived late; Hasan, up till yesterday, the most faitfull visitor didn't even show up...

We had a preview of the upcoming Enterprise Library. This will wrap up most of the MS application blocks and adds a very nice configuration tool. Avanade has built a library on top of that. Dennis Mulder tried to give an overview of how to use the library and how to fiddle with the source code of the lib. Perhaps that was a little to much for the time available. But I got a good starting point for Enterprise Libs. Most of my customers don't belong to the fortune-100 Denis's company is targeting but Enterprise Library is interesting to any .net application.

The hosting company DTS is a Delphi and a Java shop. In their introduction they spoke of Delphi being a product nearing the end of it's lide cycle and DTS setting up a new C# branch. To be followed by the presentation on...... : Delphi 2005. Which targets multiple languages: Object Pascal and C#; as well as multiple platforms: Win 32 and .net. To me it is becoming vaguer and vaguer what the moniker Delphi stands for: the language or the IDE. According to the latest insights it's the IDE again ? Which looks like a Visual Studio clone, works better than Borlands first C#builder attempts and has (in the Architect version) ECO, a very nice UML integration.

I had a pleasant drive home.

Peter