Grok Talks

Day 1 (17th October 2007)

Grok Talk 1 - Automating WPF – Ken Spencer

Ken makes extensive use of automated code generation in his development work. In this talk he will explain how he uses code generators to improve productivity, and demonstrates his own work generating code for WPF and other areas of .NET. He also has some code to give away! This is from real world experiences over the years.

Grok talk 2 - Cure Your Cross-Cutting Concerns with an Injection – Alex Homer

Now you can inject some life into your applications and blame the system administrator if it all goes wrong! One great feature of Enterprise Library is the ability to apply a series of handlers to the methods and properties of objects that your application uses, allowing you to add configurable policy-driven features such as validation, logging, exception handling, authorization, and caching, as Alex will demonstrate. You’ll even see how you can give your applications a well-earned rest on a Sunday…

Day 2 (18th October 2007)

Grok talk 1 - Dynamic Languages and .NET - Oliver Sturm

Last year Microsoft announced their future plans for dynamic language support in the .NET CLR. In theory the distinction between static and dynamic languages (such as IronPython) is clear, but in practice the lines are often blurred. Do we want to be dynamic? If so, why?, and what is it Microsoft doing in this area? Oliver’s talk shows practical examples and explains the status quo as well as future plans.

Grok talk 2 - Google Apps, .NET and Silverlight – Rob Macdonald

Google Apps represents a lightweight suite of collaboration applications that provide a browser based UI but also has an API. After a brief demonstration of Google Apps Rob’s talk will show how they can be accessed using .NET code, using LINQ and both Windows Forms and Silverlight. Together, you can use these tools to create web hosted applications with great UIs and minimal investment.