I went to the Australian Computer Society (ACS) meeting in the city last Wednesday night to hear James Crisp present on .Net 3.5 and VS2008.
James has his slides available here. It was a good session, with James explaining the following:
– A very brief overview of WWF.
– A few simple WPF examples (Flipper, Particles, 3D materials).
– Next up a discussion of WCF.
Then onto an example. James chose a nice little Recipe example to demonstrate the abilities of WPF. Using a local web server hosting a web service, he showed how to use WPF to talk to the web service and display recipes from the service.
Moving on to C# he covered the basic enhancements (Lambda functions, O-R mapping, extension methods and of course LINQ). Whilst not covering VB directly he did indicate that many of these enhancements are also in VB.
Delving further into his example application, he showed how the app pulls down data from the web service and updates a local SQL database
(Aside: He’s using Query Express to talk to the SQL Express database)
Next he dived into LINQ and explained some of the details for tying the XML data into objects that are then updated to the database.
Then onto the Search functions and how he uses Lambda functions (=>) for the searching of the XML data
Finishing up he gave a nod to the Castle Project (think Rails for .NET) and also mentioned Mono briefly (a .Net runtime for running on Mac, Linux and Unix platforms).
Overall, a great session.
