Month: February 2008

If you need to know which versions of the .NET Compact Framework are supported by your device, Microsoft have published the following list: Devices and Platforms Supported by the .NET Compact Framework.

Join us at the Perth .NET Community of Practice, March 6th to hear David Shields present on WCF. In this session, David will talk about a real life implementation of WCF and WS-Eventing. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is designed to offer a manageable approach to distributed computing, broad interoperability, and direct support for service orientation.

TOPIC: A real life of implementation WCF with David Shields
DATE: 6th March, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Level 2, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All are welcome.

David Shields is a Solutions Architect and Senior .Net Developer at Fujitsu, Western Australia, currently leading a development with Western Australia Police on a Multi-Jurisdictional Person of Interest search facility. David has been in the industry since before VB 1.0 (!) and before that had a 12 year military career in communications and security.

We will have a few goodies to give away: a Resharper license donated by JetBrains, a copy of “Head First Design Patterns” donated by O’Reilly, and a laptop/attaché carry case from Microsoft. Talent International will be providing beer and pizza. If you want a seat, try to arrive early.

Microsoft e-learning is offering 3 free clinics on ‘What’s New in Microsoft SQL Server 2008’: Collection 6187, along with a preview of Chapter 1 of “Introducing SQL Server 2008”. You can view chapter 1 right now, or you can sign up to download the entire e-book when it’s released.

A common-sense roundup of 10 mistakes often made in application design, by Jacob Nielson. I can’t help but comment that the general layout and design appeal of this site is harsh on the eye, but the advice is good!

I was browsing over at the Official Microsoft ASP.NET site and came across a link to an interesting codeproject article with some great tips: 10 ASP.NET Performance and Scalability Secrets.

The Perth .NET Community of Practice user group’s first meeting of 2008 got the year off to a great start, with a session on ASP.NET MVC presented by Michael Minutillo. It was well received, and we will endeavour to get Mike back for a further session on this hot topic. Thanks to everyone who attended and especially to everyone who helped out.

There were over 50+ people on the night, despite a clash with another event (‘Meet the Team’) being run by Change Corporation, and the fact that the announcement that we were going to have beer and pizza went out quite late!

Bill Poole from Change Corporation gave a brief introduction to Change Corporation’s involvement with .NET development and reaffirmed their ongoing commitment to support the Perth .NET community. We are indebted for their support. Bill has also kindly offered to present an upcoming talk on Service Oriented Architecture. More details soon.

Thanks go to Talent International for arranging and supplying the refreshments. And last but not least, a mention of all our sponsors: Change Corporation, Excom, Talent International, SoftTeq, JetBrains, Power Business Systems, Microsoft and all the publishers who are contributing to the User Group Library: O’Reilly, Apress, Pearson IT, Peachpit.

Scott Guthrie’s ASP.NET team have released an ASP.NET wiki (currently in beta).

[Personally, I think it definitely looks like a Beta and could do with better navigation and layout but I’m sure that will come.]

Thanks to Mike Minutillo for the heads up.

Microsoft Windows CE .NET 4.2 Alphabetical List of How-to Topics: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms918395.aspx

Articles about .NET Compact Framework at Pocket PC Developer Network: http://www.windowsmobiledn.com/sections/dotnet.html. Many of these articles are quite old, but they do contain the odd useful snippet.

Optimize Your Pocket PC Development with the .NET Compact Framework

This MSDN webcast covers quite a few topics, and most will be familiar, but it’s a good, commonsense refresher: Optimizing Your .NET Compact Framework 2.0 Applications for Performance (Level 200)

There is a large collection of Mobility Webcasts here.

.NET Compact Framework version 2.0 Performance and Memory Working Set FAQ.

Thinking of using the Compact Framework for ‘real’-time applications? Chris Tacke’s January 2008 article, “Performance Implications of Crossing the P/Invoke Boundary” is an interesting read.

Log4Net is a simple and effective logging solution for .Net applications. If you want to use it with the .NET Compact Framework, you just need to recompile the source code that is part of the standard 1.2.10 (zip) download package. Open the solution file (.sln), make sure build is set to Release, and compile with symbols NETCF and NETCF_1_0 defined in the log4net project properties [don’t forget to update the assembly references to point to the Compact Framework 2.0 SP2 DLLs, rather than the standard framework ones]

(Note: although we are compiling for CF 2.0 there is no NETCF_2_0 symbol to define)

What are the differences between the Compact and Standard versions? http://logging.apache.org/log4net/release/framework-support.html