September .NET User Group

I went to the September .NET User Group meeting on Tuesday. They announced that Microsoft has changed its mind and all the new XML stuff they talked about last time is cancelled. It may become available as a SourceForge project.

The talk was on Test Driven Development, which I thought seemed somewhat impractical.

I discovered Dan Mannes, one of the new employees at work, also attends these user group meetings. I'd thought he looked familiar.

August .NET Users Group Meeting

The topic for this month's Kansas City .NET User Group meeting was "Introduction to System.Xml and Web Services" and the presenter was Microsoft MVP in XML, Jeff Julian. He's the creator of the .NET Book Club and hosts the blogging system Geekswithblogs.net.

Some highlights (Microsoft propaganda?) from the meeting. I forgot my notebook so they're from memory.

• Microsoft is deprecating XSLT in favor of XQuery. System.Xml.Xsl is going to be marked as obsolete in .NET 2.0 and will return warning messages when its used.
• XmlDocument and the XML DOM are also being deprecated in favor of improved XML streaming techniques that will allow editing not just appending to the end of the stream.
• SAX is bad because its Java and its old. (See what I mean about the propaganda?)
  
• He demonstrated using XmlDocument, XPathNavigator, XmlReader, XmlWriter, and used a web service to demonstrate XML serialization.

I ran into former co-workers Galen and Derrick Vidacak at the meeting and had a good time talking to Derrick for a while after the meeting.

XmlNameTable: The Shiftstick of System.Xml

XmlNameTable: The Shiftstick of System.Xml: "The XmlNameTable enables object reference comparison rather than string value comparison and is useful in documents with many repeating known elements, attributes or namespaces which are automatically added to the XmlReaders XmlNameTable, a process called atomization. This allows you to then added your own names to the nametable and perform efficicent object comparisons rather than character by character string comparisons."

Application Blocks Links

Useful URLs:
The article has links to information on:
Leveraging Application Blocks in Your Applications
Rapid Application Development with Visual Studio 2005
XML, XQuery, and CLR Integration in SQL Server 2005
SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services

.NET Users Group

I went to the April meeting of the local .NET users group tonight. It was held at Centriq University. I ran into Marlin, Richard, Galen, and Ovace who are some former co-workers of mine.

Highlights from the meeting:

• There's a new .NET Book Club.


• SQL Server Reporting Services lets you design reports in Visual Studio.NET 2003 and is free if you have an SQL Server license. It uses Report Definition Language, an XML-based schema for defining reports.


• The presenters recommended that we visit the MSDN XML Developer Center because XML development is changing radically and we'll probably have to rewrite all our XML code in the near future.


• The main presentation was a demonstration of Whidbey (Visual Studio.NET 2005) by Steve Loethen, the Microsoft Developer Evangelist for the MidAmerica District. It was pretty interesting although it was fairly similar to the demo I saw at DevDays. Whidbey has some very cool features that I'm looking forward to using. The Virtual PC software he was using also looked interesting although it seemed to be having some problems with XP service pack 2.