BizTron

From: TVUG President, Griff Townsend:

Sorry for the delay in getting this out: things always seem to get hectic around the time to put announcements out, and this month was no exception. With that said, I've spoken with this month's presenter (in the mirror), and he is ready to go.
Using the Entity Framework in .Net 3.5 SP1

Speaker: Griffith Townsend, MCP.Net, MCSE
When: Tuesday September 8th, 2008 - 6:30-9PM
Where: VersaTrans Solutions, Latham, NY

When developing multi-tiered applications, it’s not uncommon that to encounter code and architectural “noise” where a developer is forced to shift languages between the business logic layer and the data layer. The preference of many developers is the use of tools (typically Object Relational Mapping solutions) to abstract the database-specific aspects of the data layer into objects usable by the upper layers by object-oriented programming languages.

Microsoft’s long awaited Entity Framework (EF) is one approach to raise the level of abstraction in complex applications, separating the logical object schema from the underlying data store. EF allows developers a lot of flexibility in creating and mapping database entities, relationships, functions, and procedures into either direct class translations or custom business entities.

In this presentation, Griff Townsend introduces us to the Entity Framework as of its initial release in SP1, providing an architectural overview of EF, while also extending it into a working Data Layer. The presentation will also cover:

• Building your first EF model
• Using Stored Procedures and customizing business objects in the EF model
• Extending the Framework to support more robust data access
• LINQ to EF vs. LINQ to SQL
• Sharing Entities between layers

Bio: Griff Townsend is a Senior Software Engineer for 6N Systems and the President of the Tech Valley .Net Users Group. In addition to over 14 years of web- and windows- development experience in Central and Upstate New York, he has also taught Software Development for Syracuse University and ITT Tech. He is a Microsoft Certified Developer in .Net, as well as a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. He's starting to blog these days, too.

TVUG Presentation - July 22nd, 2008 

TVUG President wrote in an e-mail to the Tech Valley .NET Users Group membership.  Please join us...

TVUG is proud to announce our first summer meeting with the return of John Pappa to Upstate New York. John's been working on a book tying data services with Silverlight 2, and he's been kind enough to give us a run through of a number of new technologies, and how they integrate together. This meeting will be held July 22nd in our standard location: our regular meeting schedule will resume in September, with a topic TBA.

Data Services with Silverlight 2

Speaker: John Pappa, MVP, MSDN Columnist, INETA Speaker
When: Tuesday July 22nd, 2008 - 6:30-9PM
Where: VersaTrans Solutions, Latham, NY

Silverlight enables developers to use their .NET and XAML skills to develop Rich Internet Applications and to build data driven Silverlight applications that communicate with multi-tier architectures. This session will show how to build Silverlight 2 applications that communicate with and consume REST services and use LINQ to XML to manage XML content, show the various data binding techniques, and show how to use WCF to talk to various middle tier services including custom entity models and the Entity Framework.

Bio

John Papa is a Microsoft C# MVP, INETA speaker, consultant with ASPSOFT, speaker, author, and trainer who specializes in professional application development with Microsoft technologies including VB, C#, .NET and SQL Server. John has written over 60 articles and authored several books on data access technologies including ASP.NET, WPF, Silverlight, ADO.NET, XML, and SQL Server. He can often be found speaking at industry conferences such as VSLive and DevConnections, and viewed on MSDN Web Casts. John is currently working on his upcoming book titled Data Services with Silverlight 2 by O’Reilly due out in December 2008.