Man, it was good to be back at a user group. Since I got married on April 30th, this is the first UG meeting I've actually made it to. I missed May due to travel, June only featured 2 so far and both of those I couldn't make... Anyway - it was good to see the familiar faces.
Doug Ware gave the first session. He intended this to be a group debugging effort where the people in the audience could tell him what he'd done wrong in his quick little data-binding application. However, in his attempt to recreate his issue in front of the crowd, he actually solved his own problem. Basically, when you do databinding using a binding source and binding navigator you can run into trouble linking the Save Changes button's behavior up to a row update if you do things in the wrong order. However, if you do things in the order Visual Studio expects (basically drag a database field out to the form and let VS create the binding source and navigator) then you'll be in good shape. Doug's excuse for having problems in such simple drag and drop app design - "I've been doing enterprise work for so long I never even tried this stuff before." His blog has been especially active in recent months, so everyone be sure to leave him some comments about what he should be doing with his spare time.
Shawn Wildermuth gave the second presentation. Shawn's talk was basically a survey of ADO.NET 2.0's evolution of database access functionality and some of the upcoming ADO.NExT features. Shawn will probably have his talk online soon, so I'm not going to go into too many of the specifics. Suffice it to say that Shawn thinks lots of things have been improved but there is still room for more improvement. Also - use typed DataSets and DataTables. Oh, I forgot to mention that Shawn thinks the political fracturing of Microsoft's data teams (the ASP.Net data team, the Visual Studio Data Team, and the guys responsible for the other stuff (Ok, so I forgot who did what - sue me)) is a problem because they don't talk to each other. This has resulted in things like ASP.NET not using the same ADO.NET CommandBuilders that WinForms apps use. Come on - can't we all just get along?
Additional ADO.NET links: