Ralf Westphal, Independent

Ralf Westphal is an independent author, coach/consultant, and frequent speaker at developer events like Microsoft DevDays, COMDEX, SD West, BASTA!, ADC, or Microsoft Technical Summit. His focus is on teaching modern software technology concepts with regard to the .NET Framework. Ralf is interested in application architecture, data access, and also the use of more esoteric technologies like multithreading and reflection.

In addition Ralf is one of five independent German Microsoft Regional Directors (RD), producer of a weekly video series for developers (www.dotnettv.de), an associate of the international consulting company thinktecture (www.thinktecture.com) and ,with co-RD Christian Weyer, one of the .NET Twins (www.dotnettwins.de)

Track:   .NET Best Practices

Abstract:

Implementing persistence and data access into .NET applications is still tricky, costly and time-consuming, also with ADO.NET. Relational table structures have to be mapped to objects, in most projects appr. 30%-40% of the entire code are related to data access. Some O/R mapping tools bode well, but don't really solve the basic problem : the totally different data model of the relational and the object oriented approach. Only an object oriented data management systems (ODBMS) can really slash the effort and provide fast, easy, flexible, and maintainable data access.

In this session Ralf Westphal describes usage and handling of an ODBMS (C# and VB.NET respectively), considering FastObjects .NET as example. It seems to be kind of magic: Complex object models are stored automatically, database structures are easily defined inside classes in the code, and objects can even be stored object oriented to a SQL server database - without editing code.