Data on the Smart Client Talk at Bay.NET UG
Last night I spoke to SF Bay.NET user's group on Data Binding in Winforms and WPF, focusing on Line-of-Business (LOB) application scenarios. I showed how you can use the same data sources with Winforms and WPF, walking through binding scenarios with DataSets, custom object collections and some LINQ to SQL classes. I showed the common data binding interfaces and demonstrated the main objects involved in data binding in both Windows client technologies. I also showed the side effects on data binding when using LINQ over these data sources.
I then tried to squeeze in a 10 minute discussion and demonstration of n-tier scenarios and how to handle some of the main issues you run into depending on your choice of data source and data access technology. I also plugged my "forms over data" videos. Of course I could have gone another hour! I ALWAYS have too much material. I should just do a day training class or something.
I think the talk turned out really well (I snuck a look at the evals and looks like people got a lot from the talk). Next time I'll cut down on the Winforms demos and focus on WPF and more n-tier, switching to Winforms only as a necessary comparison once in a while. However, I was impressed with the number of people that had not done Winforms data programming and there were a lot of note takers and questions when I went through the Winforms demos as well. Maybe I'll break it into two sessions and add them to my SV code camp talks.
I promised the crowd I would post the deck and the code I showed. Special thanks to Brian Noyes and his awesome " Data Binding with Windows Forms 2.0 " book that I bought a couple years ago and still refer to often. One of the code demos I showed was based on some of the code from this awesome book. I have a signed copy ;-) The only thing I wish was that there was a WPF update, hint hint hint ;-)
Download the presentation here.
Enjoy!