Whidbey, ObjectSpaces and Mexico, Oh My!

I'm just heading back home from Vancouver tonight on a red eye. When I get home, I have time for a load of laundry or two and then I'm flying to Mexico. Not just for some R&R, but I've also arranged to speak at the Mayan Riviera .NET User Group. (MR. Nug). I'm not sure what is better - going on vacation, or being able to write it off as a business expense. Unfortunately the only Spanish I know is “Dos cervasa por favor“ therefore this talk will be in English. My apologies.

I'm going to be speaking about the new DataSet that is coming in Whidbey. By the time I get there, beta 2 should be available for download and it should be public knowledge that ObjectSpaces will finally be shipping as part of the whidbey release. I just got a preliminary build last night, so I'm going to try to do a demo of using a dataset with O/R mapping via ObjectSpaces.

As you may have also heard, bundled into 2.0 Typed Datasets are Typed DataAdapters, also known as TableAdapters. In addition to TableAdapters, beta 2 will introduce typed forms, known as TypedForms. These will be precanned forms for both Web and Windows access that couples an easily painted form right on top of a dataset...with zero code. The cool thing about this is that you can simply add a column to your database table, and this will automatically change your data access layer, your middle tier entity and data entry forms. Likewise, you'll be able to simply drag a text box onto your TypedForms and this will automatically modify your database schema to add a new column to the table.

There is also some discussion going on about also adding a TypedReport into the dataset that couples Sql Reporting Services Reports directly into your typed dataset class. This stuff is going to be so easy to use, that it is likely going to make it's way into InfoPath as part of the Office product so that end users can create their own data entry forms and reports in InfoPath. This new edition of InfoPath is going to be named “InfoMaker“. More information on this is available here. This new collection of classes in the dataset are now going to be collectively known as a "DataWindow". Again, more details here. No, it's not a snowy day hell. Hard to believe isn't it. This is surely a day to mark on your calendar.