Thank you North Carolina!
I had a great trip in North Carolina… In addition to a fun time with my extended family, I had a chance to take two days “off” vacation and visit with three Fortune 500 companies, give a Framework Design Guidelines training class to the Visual Studio North Carolina office and speak at the Triangle Area .NET User’s group.
Overall, I am very impressed with the .NET community in North Carolina. I found a ton of passion and interest in Silverlight 2 in both consumer facing Internet applications as well as browser clients for internal line of business applications. I was also impressed with the interest in ASP.NET Dynamic Data (which we just did an updated preview of) and there were a few folks that were super excited about ASP.NET MVC.
At the .NET User's group there were just over 90 people there and a I was lucky enough to have a local control vendor FarPoint, sponsored this event in a very North Carolina way. Their team barbequed a pig! Several members of the team took the day off to prepare the BBQ, slaw, baked beans and you guessed it – banana pudding! It was a great change from the normal pizza user group fair. Thanks FarPoint! (check out the pictures from Steve Jackle)
Enjoying the BBQ
I had a great time doing the demos for the user’s group meeting I covered three main areas via an all-demo-no-slides format where I coded up these apps from scratch. It was a lot of fun and the interaction with the audience was great!
Enjoying the conversation
Silverlight 2
I showed a couple of cool demos from https://silverlight.net then did an end-to-end coding demo. I created a new Silverlight project, showed how to write a basic Xaml layout, then did client side code behind in C#, customized the UI in blend including some cool animations, then I used the great visual layout capabilities of Expression to build standard form based UI complete with a DataGrid. I then went back to the server project and created a data access layer with Linq, encapsulated it with a WCF service and consumed that from the Silverlight client!
Download the completed Silverlight 2 WFC demo in C#
Download the completed Silverlight 2 WFC demo in Visual Basic
ASP.NET MVC
I showed how to build (and test!) a basic ASP.NET MVC application based on a LINQ datamodel. I created a solution with a web application and unit test project. I added a data access layer with Linq, created some a new controller action with business logic then created a very clean view to display the data. I then showed how to test one of the action methods with a test specific subclass.
ASP.NET Dynamic Data
I demoed the latest bits by creating a linq data model with a ton of tables. I then enabled the Dynamic Data to auto generate UIs… the result (with no code) was a complete application to create, edit, update and view all of the data. I then showed three different layers to customize this UI. I created a Products class and added custom metadata to display how the products table is displayed including an allowed range and a tooltip. Then I customized how all the ListDetails pages are displayed using the ListDetails.aspx template and finally I changed how all strings in the application are displayed by changing the Item template.
Comments
Anonymous
April 11, 2008
PingBack from http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2008/04/11/thank-you-north-carolina.aspxAnonymous
April 13, 2008
I had a great trip in North Carolina… InAnonymous
April 15, 2008
Thanks Brad for a very interesting presentation. It's one thing to read about a lot of the demos, but it's much better to see them in person. Thanks for taking the time to demo them to the .Net group.Anonymous
April 15, 2008
Brad Abrams came to the TRINUG meeting on April 9 and knocked us all out.  He always gives a greatAnonymous
April 17, 2008
No, thank YOU Brad for taking the time to visit with us and share your knowledge and expertise of new Microsoft technologies. Jim Duffy Microsoft Regional Director (NC & SC)Anonymous
June 10, 2008
Brad Abrams thanked us for sponsoring the Triangle Area .NET User’s Group meeting last week. You're welcome!