Northwest Ohio .NET User Group (2/20 meeting) summary
We had a great meeting at the Northwest Ohio .NET User Group last night. I was pleasently surprised by a larger-than-expected crowd. We had our "launch event" so I'm guessing some of the extras were due to that. Our launch event consisted of me presenting a quick session on IIS 7 and its virtues. Looking forward to using IIS 7- lots of good benefits and Vista allows users to get ready for deploying web apps on Longhorn Server. I jokingly mentioned that since IIS 7 on vista no longer has the 10 connections limitations that developers could run IIs 7 apps in production. I really was kidding- please don't run apps in production from Vista!! Development only! :) In all seriousness, the new management console, web.config options for web site configuration, ease of extensibility and creating custom ISAPI filters is way cool. I particularly liked the demo that came on the launch presentation CD that showed how to automagically append copyright notices to every image that came through the pipeline with a few lines of C# code.
We also had Ken Kutz and Reuben Ahmed speak on code generation and agile development methodologies. They've done some really cool stuff with DotNetNuke. Simply create a database schema, and point the code generator tool at it. It will generate a DNN friendly module that can be plugged right in. On a related note, Jason Follas mentioned a similar tool called CodeSmith. I have heard of it but never used it, but just downloaded it and will be playing around with it. Jason says he uses it regularly for developing the data tiers. I'm looking forward to trying it out.