DataSources and Data Binding

Today at DevTeach I packed the house with my ever popular "DataSources and Data Binding" talk. Last year was also a full room and as D'Arcy points out here, the other speakers this year should have hired a circus act to compete :-). That's the nature of data binding, it's a very popular topic because it's hard to write a Winforms application without using it. It was a pretty fast paced talk and I showed a lot of demos and hardly any PowerPoint (just the way I like them). I mentioned to the crowd that if they were beginners then they would want to check out my How-to videos on MSDN.

I started out with building a simple Winforms application from scratch with one form and one DataSet just to show how easy it is to use the designers in VS2005. However, the architect in me couldn't resist showing the new Orcas n-tier DataSet designer and the WCF service reference and type sharing option just like John showed in the Orcas Overview webcast a couple weeks ago. I also showed a tiny bit of LINQ just to show how much better the experience is when setting filtering and sorting on your objects.

The rest of the talk was all VS2005 and I showed all code and no designers from then on, explaining all of the features of the BindingSource and the interfaces related to data binding. I realize I went through a lot of information quickly (as pointed out by one attendee) but an hour and 15 minutes is a bit short for such a large topic and I was just to darn excited about it to leave anything out :-). If anybody wants to work through the examples, they're attached to this post.

As always, I'm really enjoying DevTeach. Now back to the great sessions!

DataBinding.zip

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 15, 2007
  It was an awesome session and it's not just the subject that packs the room it's your quality as a speaker! People, if you want to learn on data binding, go to her sessions cos she knows her stuff!

• Anonymous
  May 17, 2007
  sorry I was n't in the session.. I'm new to VB and you video are really interesting and encouraging. Do you think I will learn this way or is there any book will you recommend Thanks.

• Anonymous
  May 18, 2007
  isnt a single dataset instead of one for every operation easier to manage? especially when updating after changes to the database ? maybe you can explain your technique. i enjoyed your webcast

• Anonymous
  May 19, 2007
  Hi Kendell, It depends on the type of application. If you are building a small client-server application for instance, having one big dataset can work. The issue is as the application needs to scale out to an n-tier design, you will want to break up the datasets into smaller entities so that serialization of your data will perform well. -Beth