I thought I would write about each of the talks I'm giving next week at VSLive Toronto. My first talk is Smart Data Clients 2.0. It's part of the Smart Client track, a track that focuses on building applications that run on your OS. Yes, I'm talking about Windows applications here.
Abstract
Working with data is a necessity for every business application. ADO.NET 2.0 is chock full of improvements and the Windows Form team has been steadily improving the data-binding pieces. We’ll start this data tour by looking at the new drag-and-drop data-binding features of Visual Studio. We see how easy it is to bind to databases, business objects, and Web services. Next we’ll look at the enhanced data controls (DataContainer, GridView, DataConnector, DataNavigator). Each of these controls is completely new and loaded with lots of new enhancements. We’ll walk you through a detailed exploration of these new data controls including: UI look and behavior, data-binding support, improved validation and formatting features, and better Null binding. Last on the agenda is a tour of the SQLClient changes—asynchronous data and data paging.
What it's about
This is my oldest talk on the agenda and still one of the most popular. What I try to show is how Microsoft has made data-binding usable in Windows Forms. Really usable. As in - you might really use data-binding to build production applications.
I start by showing the whole binding process - start to finish - withing Visual Studio 2005. Then I show a bunch of the improvements in the data controls, like the GridView control. Then I focus for a few minutes on binding to sources that have Null values. Remember the old days when your application would throw an exception you you tried to show a Null value in a bound control. No more.
Finally I show how to dynamically page data into a grid, pulling just enough rows to satisfy the bound controls current needs.