Microlau's Blog

Sep 2007 #40 UG Meeting

It’s the Lunar 7th month (Hungry Ghost Festival) and Weehyong will be talking about Casper, not Jasper this month! Also, Alan Andrews will be starting a discussion to talk about the benefits of OpenXML.

Our September 2007 UG meeting will be held on 6th September 2007 (1845 – 2100hrs) at Microsoft Singapore, Level 22 CF12.

Benefits of OpenXML
Alan Andrew Dias (MVP, Mobile Devices)
This two part session delves into understanding OPENXML and how it will impact the Developer Community. The first part will deal with 5W+H of OPENXML (What, Who, Where, Why, When and How) in a demo led presentation. The second part deals with what is the impact of OPENXML for every developer.

Introduction to Jasper - Rapidly Application Development using Dynamic ADO.NET
Tok Wee Hyong (MVP, SQL Server)
Alvin Lau (MVP, ASP.NET)
Developers spend significant amount of time on writing code for data access and binding the data to the UI controls. It would have been a great boost to developer productivity if effort spend on data access and binding to UI controls can be significantly reduced.

Project Jasper is an incubation effort in the ADO.NET team to enable quick, clean and iterative development with instant results. Project Jasper provides this functionality by leveraging the ADO.NET Entity Framework and the power of dynamic languages. With Project Jasper you can drag and  drop standard ASP.NET controls onto a page, set basic properties and your web application will be able to display and edit data without forcing you to write a query or any data access code.

In this talk, you will learn about the key concepts behind Project Jasper, and how this upcoming technology can empower you to build next-generation applications quickly.

About the Speaker
Wee Hyong is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for SQL Server.  He is deeply passionate advancing the  state-of-art of database technology, and speaks regularly at various Microsoft events (TechReady,   MSDN Connection Meet-the-Experts, Channel9) and usergroup meetings (.Net usergroups in Singapore and Malaysia, SQL Server Usergroup).  Over the past years, he has been actively sharing with the developer and DBA community in tapping the immense potential of SQL Server technology for data management and business intelligence.
Alvin Lau is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for ASP.NET. He's currently working as a Consultant within Avanade Singapore and is very motivated to improve practices for .NET development and agile methodology. Off work, he's deeply involved in the IT community events within Singapore user groups.

To register for the event, sign up here.

KL TechNite + MIND: Developers Rock - 6.20 p.m. 9th September 2007 Starbucks, Bangsar Village II, Bangsar

For those of you who've going down to TechEd, don't miss this event by Malaysian Independent Developers Community (MIND) just before TechEd. For SGDN members, there's limited VIP offer which MIND graciously extends to - But while stock lasts. To be entitled to this special VIP offer, drop an email to me.

Excessive Webservice Calls?

I was having an interesting discussion about applications relying heavily on web service calls and purely relying on web services as an application server. In his opinion, an application which only uses web service as the sole and only means of sending data to the application server is simply abusing the usage of web service. And he belongs to the school of thought that datasets are simply a waste of bandwidth and processing power.

True, especially when coupled by bad or no design, developers will be left on their own to conjure a design which simply fits their immediate purpose. Developers tend to think about the immediate concerns, of which the main objective (at least to me) is to complete the task in the specified timelines.

Is this problem just common within Singapore or widespread to all IT projects around the globe, I wonder?

Managing Resources in .NET

A simple tip for managing your resources smartly with 'using'

using (SqlConnection sqlConn =
   new SqlConnection(...))
{
   sqlConn.Open();
   using (SqlCommand sqlCmd =
          new SqlCommand(..., sqlConn))
   {
      using (SqlDataReader dr = cmd.ExecuteReader())
      {
         // Access elements items here
      }
   }
}

Extract from MSDN:
C#, through the .NET Framework common language runtime (CLR), automatically releases the memory used to store objects that are no longer required. The release of memory is non-deterministic; memory is released whenever the CLR decides to perform garbage collection. However, it is usually best to release limited resources such as file handles and network connections as quickly as possible.

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