As Julie said in a recent post, we Vermont nerds are SO spoiled with phenomenal presentations at our monthly Vermont DotNet Users Group meetings. Tonight was no exception. Jason Beres, currently an evangelist for Infragistics and INETA speaker, spoke tonight on building n-tiered Windows Applications. It was EXACTLY what I needed! I've been thinking and working a lot with Collections during my recent latenight sessions, and Jason helped clarify things for me, demonstrating how a serialized arraylist served to decouple the presentation layer from the data layer. I've (finally!) started investigating Eric Smith's CodeSmith recently and am starting to get my head around it, but Jason showed us a Code Generation app he threw together that knocked my socks off. Julie will be putting it on our site, but you can get this as well as Jason's n-tiered app (an excellent study) at the Florida .NET Users Group site. I saw other good stuff there tonight, as well. The downside of both Jason's n-tiered app and the code generation app is that both are VB.NET. Conceptually, I still learned a lot from the Windows app and the VB.NET generated code can be converted and still be a huge timesaver.
Yeap, I REALLY enjoyed Jason Beres tonight, and what kills me is that I never heard about him before. Now he's definitely one of my favorite, must-see presenters.