Scot Alt.Net - An Evening of O/RM - 2nd July

[Chris Canal]

O/RMs help us bridge the gap between the database and the code base we love to write. On the night we will be looking at two O/RMs, NHibernate the most mature O/RM in the Alt.Net space and Microsoft's recently released Enitiy Framework, the young pretender to the O/RM thrown.

ScottLogic, a leading financial software and consultancy company based in Edinburgh, have been kind enough to offer the use of their premises for an evening of O/RM knowlege sharing and dicussion.  The event will take place on 2nd of July at 7pm, 17 Gayfield Square Edinburgh EH1 3NX.  All are welcome!

The agenda for the evening is as follows:

7.00 - 7.30 Paul Cowan - An Introuction to NHibernate
7.30 - 8.00 Chris Canal - FluentNHibernate in 15 minutes
8.00 - 8.10 Break
8.10 - 8.40 Colin Gemmell - NHibernate vs Entity Framework - which is best?

After the meeting we will retire for a beer and some heated discussion.  If you are planning to attend, please let us know by registering at the Scot Alt.Net Edinburgh EventBrite page (http://altdotnetedinburgh.eventbrite.com/).

About the speakers

Paul Cowan has recently started his own business Cutting-Edge Solutions.  He is a keen advocate of iterative development, test driven development, continuous integration and modern techniques.  Paul is a regular committer to the horn open source project.  He recently gave a presentation on horn at the Dsl DevCon at Microsoft in Seattle.  You can follow his blog here.

Chris Canal has worked at a Web Developer for the past 7 years. Starting with procedural languages like ASP and PHP, he quickly moved onto the .NET Platform when first released. A great believer is continual–improvement, Chris is constantly looking for new technologies, tools and methodologies that will help in creating robust and maintainable software applications. Having felt the pain of using Microsoft "Demoware", Chris has become an active member of the Scottish Alt.Net Community to share his findings and ideas with like-minded developers.

Colin Gemmel is a Web/Application Developer working in the Medical Faculty of Glasgow University for the past 3 years. An avid follower of agile principles and practices he is always happy to pass on his views of software development to anyone that will listen. Colin is also a regular participant of the Scottish Alt.Net Community

http://scotalt.net/blog/2009/06/11/an-evening-of-orm/
http://www.scottlogic.co.uk/contact_info
http://altdotnetedinburgh.eventbrite.com/
http://groups.google.com/group/scotaltnet

--
"Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand."
-Martin Fowler et al, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

[Christopher Brind]

Not to down-play what looks like a great event, but I would also recommend checking out db4o, which is an OODB for Java and .NET.  This basically means you can throw your ORM and RDBMS out of the window (subject to 'right tools for the right job' caveat, of course):

http://www.db4o.com/

I estimate it saved me about 20-30% development time on my last project and has been one of the most stable parts of the system with virtually no learning curve. 

Cheers,
Chris

2009/6/11 Chris Canal <dhtm...@gmail.com>

[Chris Canal]

Been meaning to check it out.  How do you deal with reporting?  Have a seperate RDBMS?

[Christopher Brind]

It wasn't the kind of application that need reporting as such.  However, there are a number of approaches.  db4o supports replication to an RDBMS and in Java land some reporting tools (such as Birt) support db4o as a data source, though I haven't actually tried that yet.