The March 2005 Colombo .NET User Group Meeting was held, as normal, at Gateway in Rodney Street In Borella. As always, entrance is free. Around 20 people attended the meeting this month. We started a bit late, around 18:30 and finished around 20:00.
This month the meeting centered around a talk by Merill on Enterprise Library (EL). Merill gave a brief explanation of application blocks and then briefly explained the 7 different application blocks contained in EL. Merill then gave a detailed explanation about why we would want to use EL and then went on to explain four of the seven application blocks (data access, error handling, logging and instrumentation, configuration) in detail with some excellent examples. Included in Merill's demonstration was a practical demonstration using Visual Studio which included a demonstration of how to perform a full installation of EL, how to include references to EL in projects and how to create C# examples and using the EL configuration manager.
This was a truely excellent presentation on a product I had never heard of before. Merill is an excellent speaker whose enthusiasm comes over whenever he speaks about .NET. He is extremely knowledgable about his subject matter and easily handles any questions (and I always have a few) that get thrown at him during his talks. As a consequence of Merill's presentation I have downloaded and install EL on my laptop :)
I hope to come up with a presentation myself to give to the group but my knowledge base is still very VB.Classic orientated and I am some way behind the other MVPs when it comes to .NET. I am working on it though guys, even if its just a short 15-30 minutes presentation on some basic part of .NET :)
The Colombo .NET User Group has its own forum at http://www.dotnetforum.lk/