What
The Developers Group Meeting

Where
Microsoft, Cardinal Place, 100 Victoria Street, London SW1E 5JL
click here for map and directions

When
Wednesday January 21st 11.30 – 6.30
with leader Jason Chapman

Agenda
11:30 Registration (with tea, coffee and bacon or egg rolls, if you’re early enough).

12:00 Welcome, News and Interactive Discussion – Let’s talk about:
• The latest in Delphi & .NET – problems, questions, solutions; your latest technical discoveries.
• Your programming problems; what progress you’re making with Vista.
• Your favourite – and most hated – tools; the things you want to know more about.
• Your questions/solutions on what hardware/software to choose.
• and anything else that’s relevant to the group.

1:00 Really Getting Started with ECO – Scott Price
BOLD was Delphi’s native Object Persistence Framework and much more. When CodeGear ventured
into Delphi.NET, BOLD evolved into its current form called Enterprise Core Objects which is a much
more advanced product these days, including built-in state machine support, temporal object support
and many more services now available utilizing the .NET Framework and Visual Studio/RAD Studio.
ECO can help substantially reduce your development effort or time when creating new database
systems, sometimes as much as 50-70% in my experience with the data access layers I’ve used in the
past. Being model based you draw your domain objects in standard UML, and the tools produce the
associated classes for you to use in your application. ECO then looks after all of the persistence for
you, the evolution of the database structure as your model changes over time, and many more things.
However, getting started when you are used to doing everything in SQL was quite a steep learning
curve at first, and perhaps I have some helpful pointers of how to get you up and running correctly at
fast, so you can start to see the most out of using it swiftly from the start.

2:15 Encryption and Compression – Cristian Nicola
The session focuses on encryption and compression as general techniques in the context of:
communication over networks, file storage, memory encryption and database field encryption. We
also then have a look at some of the general security issues and finally evaluate some of the most
standard hacker tools.

3:30 Tea/coffee and cake

4:00 Intensive Windows Workflow Foundation – Corrado Iorizzo
The pillars of .Net 3.0 are WCF (Windows Communication Foundation), WPF (Windows Presentation
Foundation) and WF (Workflow Foundation). Today we learn how to leverage WF to build your
workflow applications and how to apply a new programming model based on a declarative approach.
WF manages the execution of small units of work named activities: see how to compose those basic
activities into higher level units using rules, flowchart, and state machine control flow styles.

5:15 Find Your Way to the Pub by Silverlight – Pete Sykes
Pete walks through the development of his nascent “Pub Map” Silverlight application which he
developed as a test bed and training exercise for trying out some of the techniques needed in a “real
world” Silverlight application. He strenuously denies that he spends so much time in the pubs of
Brighton that he actually needs the application himself. The demonstration includes all sorts of good
stuff such as data binding, using the HTML bridge to talk to and from the host web page, when to use
Expression Blend (look and feel) and when to use Visual Studio (logic).
6:30 End (and supper at a local restaurant, if you wish)

Please book your place as soon as possible by contacting us at bug AT richplum DOT co DOTuk, and no later than Wednesday January 14th. Attendance is free to members of the DG and other participating user groups, £25 + VAT to guests.

We regret that meeting venues cannot accept phone messages on our behalf, and that mobile phones,
pagers, etc, must be turned off during all DG events.