Robots and web sites? Oh no!
The Atlanta .NET user group met Monday, Feb 26th to talk about the recently release Microsoft Robotics Studio and some ASP.NET 2.0 best practices. These two topics were clearly a huge draw as we had over 75 people in attendance.
The first presentation about the Robotics Studio had someone from RoboticsConnection.com presenting their company's serial IO board and downloadable .NET assembly which allows control of a robot with .NET code. The robots in attendance were simple tracked vehicles, carrying a variety of sensors and even a moveable camera. The first code demo showed us how simple it was to get the logic board to report distance objects were from the IR sensor. We got a look at the Altair-like line sensor, we looked at the web interface to the running robotics services, and we looked at equipping the robot with a laser cannon to fufill the Terminator prophecy. When will we learn that armed, self replicating robots are not a good idea!?! Well, in case you haven't learned your lesson, you can purchase a tank-like tracked robot and logic board + some sensors for something like $300 or so.
Eric Engler was up next, talking to us about how to design a web site. Web sites, in this context, are collections of pages with a common data layer, a common code/deployment model, some common UI elements, some common plumbing, and more. Starting with the data layer, Eric discussed the differences between a traditional ntier architecture and the ORM approach. Eric displayed favoritism toward the ORM approach and the Olymars tool specifically. Next, in the code/deployment model part of the talk Eric discussed the ASP.Net 2.0 features such as the App_Code folder and the ability to deploy single files or web projects (with VS2k5 SP1). In the UI model Eric discussed styles, skins, javascript, master pages, etc. The AJAX portion of the presentation has actually been deferred to the next Atlanta Cutting Edge meeting, on March 5th. In the security model portion of the presentation, Eric gave a high level discussion about user authorization, authentication, least privilege, and data protection for things like connection strings, databases, folders, and source code. In the plumbing section of the presentation, we learned about the ASP.NET Providers and base pages. We also learned about how the global.asax can help us catch errors in a catch-all type of function. Interested? Check out the post at http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/12/14/433194.aspx. Finally we talked about some deployment considerations like scrubbing your database and making sure that debug=true is NOT in the web.config.
The presentation was based on Eric's work as a technical editor on a new Wrox book - ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution.
To download Eric's presentation (everything is in the slides) go to www.EricEngler.com/Presentations.aspx