I was about half way through writing up a long winded post about choosing a data access provider for use in ASP.NET MVC projects, when somebody tweeted the URL to this excellent post.  I'd fielded several "what should I use" questions at the dev summit last week and was nearly done with my promised response when I got scooped. Definitely check it out...I'll save my comments to the drafts folder in advance of a more careful read-through  tonight.  But the noted post covers all the bases pretty well.

Recently, I've had some comments on prior blog posts and actually got called out at the ESRI Dev Summit (thanks for making me think hard on it gang) regarding how I (or you) might build a DAL for use with a Microsoft ASP.NET MVC solution.  The main concern being that I identified some concerns that indicated we wouldn't be leveraging SubSonic 2.x in the future and that there was a desire to know what the options were.  Folks wanted to know who I was endorsing in the new DAL "election" and who might win out.

The ESRI Dev Summit is something I look forward to each year and 2009 did not disappoint.  Another gratuitous shout out to Jim Barry, the entire EDN team, and ESRI staffers who turned out this year and extended hospitality, knowledge, and new shiny bits to hordes of geo-geeks in spades once again.  While others will likely chime in with interesting technical summaries, I will reserve those comments for them and say only that the Silverlight API for ArcGIS Server and Build 900 are drop dead sexy.  My team doesn't do a lot of desktop work but we'll find some way to leverage ArcGIS Explorer and its fancy new managed code API.  My comments here will zero in on the evolving presence of the social network at this year's summit and what it can offer us as a development community.  Buckle up...this is likely to be a long winded post.

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Yesterday I gave a presentation at the 2009 ESRI Developer Summit on RESTful apps and services using ASP.NET MVC. As this is the first year for user sessions, I was completely surprised at the turn out. We filled the theater and spilled out in the ESRI showcase area. Lots of questions and conversations in the hallways and sitting areas following the presentation so it would appear that I actually said something interesting. [slideshare id=1193375&doc=esridevsummit2009restandmvcfinal-090324194411-phpapp01] Friendly faces in the audience took some of the pressure off and it was thoroughly enjoyable. Many thanks to Jim Barry and the EDN Team for allowing the user/developer community to step to the microphone this year. One thing of note: My sincere apologies but there's no audio with the slide deck yet. I know that these "presentation zen" type presentations can be cryptic without the audio to go along with it. ESRI has recorded both the deck and the audio and will make it available soon...I'll keep you posted on that. For now, I need to make do with distributing the pdf version above, so you don't have the slide builds, but...you get the point.

In preparation for our user presentations at the 2009 ESRI Developer Summit next week, Dave B and I spent some time last week doing dry runs of our presentations,  making some slide and content changes, etc. in an effort to polish our presentation zen a little bit.  When you've given as many presentations and Dave and I have over years, you learn to hit all of the big issues straight out of the gate.  Fonts, images, some semblance of a plan, etc. are all second nature for us now.  But every time I catch myself wondering why I should be practicing my presentation to an empty room or to a friendly audience of one or two, one of the "little things" regarding presentation style hits me square in the forehead.

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The 2009 ESRI Developer Summit is fast approaching and this year, one of the new "features" at the conference is the allocation of space and time slots for the user/developer community to speak on technical topics of interest to them.  I was fortunate enough to land one of the time slots to talk about RESTful architecture patterns and Microsoft ASP.NET MVC.  It looks like I'll be the guinea pig for the user presentations as I'm up as the very first one, speaking Tuesday, March 24 from 1:00-1:45pm.  Hopefully everyone can fight off the post-lunch food coma and stay awake for it. The original abstract for the talk is as follows:

The presentation will leverage a suite of tools in the “http goodness” toolbox to demonstrate the implementation of RESTful applications and services utilizing ESRIs REST and JavaScript APIs in association with Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC framework. Caching, linking, bookmarking, and friendly URLs are all nice features of the RESTful architecture, but consider as a developer the impact on your next geoweb app of having absolute control over addressable resources (data views and maps), guaranteed code quality governed by TDD principals, the opportunity for pluggable backend services in a hybrid solution, and the opening of doors for software and data interoperability over http! The presenter will focus on real world examples from recent development initiatives to illustrate the potential impact of RESTful services and applications in the geospatial enterprise. Architectural patterns, code examples, real world systems demos, and other shiny bits will all be in attendance.

Dave Bouwman will be speaking in one of the main technical sessions with Al Laframboise of ESRI and has also landed a user presentation slot.  For all the details on the DTS presence at the Dev Summit, check out this link. And while Dave posted on it over here, it bears repeating that DTSAgile will be sponsoring a festivus for the geo community during the conference on Monday night.  Head on over to our newly revamped website for the invitation and RSVP information.  We'll shoot out an email with directions to the gig at the end of this week. Hope to see you at the conference...