There were two days where the top speakers of Argentina gathered to bring out a true mega-event. Even more, the audience could take advantage of the lectures of one of the most important international speakers: the well-known Les Pinter.
The Argentina Microsoft Users Grup (MUG) performs several activities in that country since eight years. It has conducted many events intended for instruction of developers and users. It has also realized quite important social events and its managing group dreamt long ago with a mega event. The time for that dream to come truth became present at last. MUGDays is a reality and we know that this is the first of a lengthy list of mega events to be fulfilled at Buenos Aires.
The idea turned from an intention into a deed thanks to the sponsoring of INETA, the collaboration of the Argentina Microsoft Branch and also the support of Microsoft International.
Day 1
After a general introduction in the words of Gustavo Palau (current president of the MUG) the presentation began with the exposition of Antonio Castaño, Martín Salías and Diego González. The central topic was “Developing business components with Visual Studio.net and VFP8”.
The lecture started with a speaking of the Chief Editor of our magazine, talking about the conceptual generality of the issue showing later some common examples, both in VFP and .Net. He introduced also the classic three-tier model as part of the exposition of the evolution into an n-tier model, demonstrating the benefits offered by this kind of implementation.
After that, the microphone was passed to the MSDN Regional Director (and Fox Guru) Antonio Castaño, who displayed the topic of the objects persistence and the ORM (Object Relational Mapping). Amazingly, he told that a minimum of 30% of the code lines in any system belong to the task of transformation from the object model to the relational one and vice versa.
Figure 1: Speakers and event hosts
The talk was oriented to the normal framework of almost every system, meaning the typical process of class design followed by modeling, implementation and later to figure out how to achieve the persistence in a relational data base. This generates tables and each table generates in turn access and maintenance methods, for example through stored procedures. Consequently, a vast amount of code is generated to manage this scenario.
Antonio proposed some solutions to this issue, i.e. a data base engine object oriented, making clear that this is actually an elegant but non realistic solution for there is no such engine with a power that can match the relational ones. A further option is found in the automatic mapping products, like ObjectSpace and olyMars, assertion that prepared the ground for the introduction of an Argentine product that will cover this area.
Thus, Diego’s lecture took place. He is a PAG collaborator of Microsoft and his company is developing an application in .Net to perform automatically this mapping. This product, (currently known as Ishtar) will became soon an Application Block that all of us will enjoy.
Figure 2: General view of the auditorium
The second section was in charge of Ángel "Java" López and Carlos Peix. Its topic was “web services, session managing and performance optimization”.
Though we know that a web service is stateless by definition, Angel told us some secrets about how to keep state using the client as data store, through cookies. To completely break the rules, Carlos explained how to optimize the performance when consuming web services. Actually talking about latency and transference speed, Carlos showed when improve and when NOT care trying solve problems which actually has NO solution.
After a comforting lunch, the event itself offered a stunting “dessert”, Les Pinter was waiting for us to give some “.Net tips for xBase programmers”. He showed us the similarities and differences between VFP and .Net delighting us with his knowledge and personal relation with the audience.
Les started his lecture from the most basic level and was progressively proceeding with his seemingly innate fluency, until the implacable watch indicated that the time was over.
The lasting feeling was the persuasion that I could be 30 days listening to him again and again, and ending the month I would still be willing to listen to him. And I had still one more day.
But the first day was not over yet and we still had Daniel Laco and Mariano Álvarez waiting for us to deal with the integration between XML and SQL Server. They also offered al pretty clear introduction about the optimization of the SQL Server. Daniel began his talk showing the advantages and benefits of using XML in SQL, either through the “… for XML…” clause or SQLXML 3.0 over HTTP.
Finally, Mariano gave a thorough introduction on the use of native tools of SQL Server like “Index Tuning" and “Query Plan" to achieve performance improving without investing in hardware, which is often the simplest solution, but not always the optimum one.
Day 2
A rich and profuse description of the Remoting Services Architecture opened the second half of the event.
Figure 3: Some of the speakers with the MUG board of directors
All over the dissertation, Andrés Vettori and Adrián García took the word in turns to inform the audience about the most relevant issues relating to this issue. This included comparisons between DCOM, WEB SERVICES and REMOTING, exposing both virtues and flaws of those soft models. Later, the topic got centered on the new technology and the speakers walked through a meticulous introduction about the configuration modes, activation types and creation ways of the remote objects.
The lecture also included points like Remoting Services hosting (IIS, security, etc.) and went even further and deeper related to the most outstanding features and requirements, i.e. Proxies, Messages, Sinks, Formatters and Transport Channels.
Later, the audience had again the rare chance to enjoy the ineffable style of Les Pinter, who comfortably navigated the web services topic. He profitably used his time informing about the features of .Net for web services creation and how applications that offer and consume them are more and more demanded between the users.
Through his undeniable charisma, he kept a high attention level among the hearing during the time he remained on the stage, displaying examples of creation, configuration and use of web services, comparing .Net and VFP8 platforms too.
Following Les’ talk, Jorge Espinosa made a further explanation on the former topic, making emphasis on VFP8, causing the joy of the many FoxPro and VFP users who attended the event.
In a consistent way, Jorge demonstrated the flexibility of the tool to easily create web services through a few code lines, providing the audience with complete examples.
Finally, all the speakers gathered to close the event (the first one of such dimensions organized for the MUG), lasting in the air the feeling of the first step accomplished towards the realization of capacitating work shops of large extent and the attendance of top level speakers.
