Ron Jacobs on Enterprise Library and The Death of Code Smith?
The Tulsa .NET Users Group had the very great privilege of hosting Ron Jacobs for an excellent presentation on the Enterprise Library (formerly known as Application Blocks). You can get his power point slides from his site at RonJacobs.com.
I remember at least a few years ago taking my first look at the Data Access Block and at the time didn't think I would have much use with it. Because back then, it seemed like it did little more than offer a few methods to easily execute SQL commands and some data layer abstraction.
Well, it has come a long way and I intend to really begin utilizing the complete Enterprise Library now! It's free code (Open Source?) and gives every developer an extra layer to add on top of the framework to make our lives much easier!
After delivering an inspiring quick demonstration and discussion of what the Enterprise Library is today and how it can help us now, he then showed us an early version of the Guidance Automation Toolkit! This tool integrates into Visual Studio 2005 seamlessly and provides several wizards to generate Classes for both the Data Access Layer and the Business Objects. (Think templates and auto generated code, hmmm... Beginning to sound like Code Smith.) But, it's free, with source code (Open Source?), based of the ASP.NET scripting/text templating, just like Code Smith and you don't have to Copy and Paste from Code Smith into your actual classes!
Just another one of the many reasons to look forward to November 7 and the final release!
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About dwalker
David Walker has over 15 years experience in application development with over 50% of that employed as a consultant with companies such as: Texaco, Bank of Oklahoma, Winner Communications (ESPN.com) and IBM Global Services. At the age of 14, he began his application development ambitions with a Commodore 64, BASIC, and a 300 baud modem. Even at that early age, he primarily focused on two specific application types: multi-user communities and database applications.
His hunger to learn as much as possible about development lead him through courses such as DBase III, DBase IV, Pascal, C, C++, Java, and several in UNIX. He started his development career first doing heavy processing with Access and VBA, then moved on to VB 3, Oracle, and Delphi. Visual Basic was one environment that remained constant for many years, including his very first .NET projects performed in Visual Basic.NET.
After working several years on very high end internal Corporate applications, the consultant company he was working for, sought out his ideas for actual software products that could be packaged and sold. He had already developed several prototypes of a dynamic portal application, before portals even became popular, so this became the logic decision and he became the Director of Product Development. Under his direction, a team of developers and graphic artists, took a skinning approach before that become popular, and completed the core portal application, and continued on to developer 15+ add-on modules, including things such as: Help Desk Ticket Systems, Change Control, Records Management, Human Resources, and many more applications. Eventually, it spun off into it's own separate company as KnowledgeGEAR, a complete intranet in the box solution.
Having worked as a consultant, he has had a experience with a very wide range of applications and architectures, at one time, even converting several Fox Pro and GW-Basic applications to VB 6 and ASP. His early training of Unix and the C language and years of experience with JavaScript, lead him very quickly to C#, where he has remained focused ever since.
He is the current President of the
Tulsa Developers .NET user group.. He has been an MCP since 2003 and MCAD and MCSD since 2005. He is currently pursuing his MCDBA and then on to MCSE.