There is one on the government website. And while pro people are usually only represented by silence, it is there if you want to sign it.

 

Mike Ormond has links to some Windows Sidebar gadgets for searching MSDN. Both Tim Heuer  and  Nikhil seem to have been looking at this.

 

I'll be doing a grok talk on Windows Sidebar gadget development at the London .NET user group Office and Vista Launch event.

 

BTW Mike is running the London Marathon for Hearing Dogs for the Deaf and you can sponsor him from the link on his page. Go on, if only for the chance to see Mike run.

I just wanted to catch you all up on what the NextGen guys are up to.

 

Perhaps most importantly they are organizing NextGenUgFest07 this May. A one day conference held at Microsoft in Reading the NextGenUG boys are focusing 'Into the Future' with this event and have secured Rafal Lukawiecki, the consistently top-rated speaker for Tech Ed, from http://www.projectbotticelli.co.uk/. Having seen Rafal speak at previous Tech Ed events I can gurantee that he is very worth listening to.

 

Diniz Cruz, who is also a regular speaker at London .NET user group has done a podcast with the NextGenUG guys too which you can catch here or read here.

 

Finally I am going to be visiting the NextGenUG guys to talk about Top 5 best practices for OO in May.

Despite the documentation implying that exceptions on threads will propogate and terminate it is not always true. We have just spent time chasing behaviour that did not match this expectation with System.Timers.Timer. It turns out the System. Timers.Timer swallows exceptions and System.Threading.Timer propogates them. Jean Paul S. Boodhoo has the skinny on this one. He also used reflector to show up the offending line of code. Something we might want to make sure gets added to the documentation I think.

LINQ looks to be a phenomenally powerful but challenging change for most .NET developers. Many will be unfamiliar with the paradigms finding expression here so it is a good idea to think about putting a toe into these waters now.

 

There is a good guide over on the Server Side .NET to materials that will help you get started.

 

It looks like a busy year for .NET developers with people trying to ramp up their .NET framework 3.0 skills (WPF, WCF, WF) alongside releases like ASPNET AJAX, coupled with LINQ (shipping with Orcas for those of you living under a rock).

 

I would suggest prioritizing your learning goals against your likely commitments over the next year, but try to keep tabs on what is happening elsewhere so that you keep abreast of capabilities.

Mike Dodaro has an interesting article up on the schema for mapping using the Entity Data Manager which should ship with the  Orcas release.

 

Having been a champion of ORM tools for a while now I am really keen to see this released. There still remains a core of MS world developers who will not shift their paradigm to begin using these kind of tools until Microsoft starts shipping them.

 

We use the excellent Wilson ORM on my current project, which in itself derived a lot of its API from the failed attempt to deliver ORM tools in the .NET 2.0 release of the framework called ObjectSpaces. That said Wilson is probably best aproached by those of you with an understanding of how ORM tools work as documentation is really by source, example, forums, and trial and error.

 

IMO the biggest issue is to get people to give up their home-rolled code generation solutions in favour of off-the-shelf ORM tools for a lot of use cases. The cost of buying a tool is usually a lot cheaper than the cost of rolling your own (and the pain).

 

There area lot of players out there. I tend to think of them pretty much as different cuts of steak. You can roughly divide them into reflection (i.e. Wilson) and code generation (i.e. LLBGen Pro) based in approach. When evaluating you want to look for support for things like .NET 2.0 support (generics particularly but also nullable types), support for stored procedures supplementing your mapping (there is always something you want to do that is not quite out-oft-the-box so you will need some mild extension ability), and support for sessions (including identity maps et. al).

 

A lot of people swear by LLBGen Pro. I should also give a plug to XPO for my friends and Developer Express like Oliver Sturm.