Frans Bouma's blog

I'm not going to write a very long story about the DotNED meeting last Thursday, other than that it was great!. . Due to time restrictions I only had half an hour for the presentation and the demonstration of LLBLGen Pro, which was too short for me to explain a lot about O/R mapping, its details and how it works in practise, though I hope everyone enjoyed what I had prepared! I've translated my slides to English as well, for the few who want to have them in English.

Some people said the presentation was good but I wasn't as enthousiastic as they expected. I was and am very enthousiastic about O/R mapping and data-access as a subject, I'm just not that experienced in giving presentations (this presentation was my first in years, and my laptop appeared to be very outdated). But that might change in the future, who knows. . Either way, thanks for the feedback.

The other presentation given was by Jeroen van Helvoort who made RADvolution Designer, a layout designer toolkit. Now, besides the obvious RAD advantages of the toolkit, one thing that was really great was its naming scheme engine. You could define a naming scheme (like use m_Name_controlType) with a rich set of options and every control you added to the forms automatically adapted that naming scheme. Very clever idea, which should be a core element of Visual Studio.NET as well, for example in the class designer.

Peter van Ooijen made some great pictures of the meeting, he'll write an own review of the meeting as well, so check back on his blog as well later today. One picture he made is shown below, with me in front of the code which fetches all countries from Northwind's Customer table, filters on the selected customer, shows the customers of the selected country in a grid, the orders of the selected customer in another grid and save changes to any object in the graph customer - order - order details! Using LLBLGen Pro of course

picture by Peter van Ooijen

It's 31 degrees celcius here now, so too hot to be at a keyboard (even for a True Nerd^tm like me) so I'll write a more thourough posting tomorrow. Though I'd like to say that I very enjoyed giving the presentation about Data-acces and O/R mapping yesterday at the DotNED meeting .

Sander Gerz has a review some photo's online, I'm the tall guy in the black MVP tee

http://www.freshpatents.com/Mapping-architecture-for-arbitrary-data-models-dt20050303ptan20050050068.php (via Yves Reynhout)

At E3, Sony reveiled the specs and photo's of their upcoming console yesterday. I can only say: whoa. I've the feeling it will be tough for the XBox 360, although that's a great machine as well. One major feature of the PS3 is that it can play any game from the past, the XBox 360 only a subset.

Op de volgende DotNED meeting (de Nederlandse .NET gebruikersgroep), donderdag 26 mei a.s. zal ik een presentatie houden over Data-access, O/R mapping en LLBLGen Pro, waarna er tijd is voor discussie..

Wil je erbij zijn, bezoek dan de DotNED website: http://www.dotned.nl/meeting.aspx

Tot dan!

All the feedback has payed off! . Read the whole beef here: http://blogs.msdn.com/rickla/archive/2005/05/12/416994.aspx

After 4 months of development and 2 months of beta-testing, it's finally done: LLBLGen Pro v1.0.2004.2 has been released!

As an O/R mapper developer I was looking forward to nullable types in .NET 2.0, so I could solve the problem of nullable value types in a solid way, but I just peeked into the new online .NET 2.0 Beta 2 documentation for VB.NET but I couldn't find any reference about nullable types in VB.NET.