DataSources and Data Binding
Today at DevTeach I packed the house with my ever popular "DataSources and Data Binding" talk. Last year was also a full room and as D'Arcy points out here, the other speakers this year should have hired a circus act to compete :-). That's the nature of data binding, it's a very popular topic because it's hard to write a Winforms application without using it. It was a pretty fast paced talk and I showed a lot of demos and hardly any PowerPoint (just the way I like them). I mentioned to the crowd that if they were beginners then they would want to check out my How-to videos on MSDN.
I started out with building a simple Winforms application from scratch with one form and one DataSet just to show how easy it is to use the designers in VS2005. However, the architect in me couldn't resist showing the new Orcas n-tier DataSet designer and the WCF service reference and type sharing option just like John showed in the Orcas Overview webcast a couple weeks ago. I also showed a tiny bit of LINQ just to show how much better the experience is when setting filtering and sorting on your objects.
The rest of the talk was all VS2005 and I showed all code and no designers from then on, explaining all of the features of the BindingSource and the interfaces related to data binding. I realize I went through a lot of information quickly (as pointed out by one attendee) but an hour and 15 minutes is a bit short for such a large topic and I was just to darn excited about it to leave anything out :-). If anybody wants to work through the examples, they're attached to this post.
As always, I'm really enjoying DevTeach. Now back to the great sessions!