I had to work really hard preparing for last week’s session on the Enterprise Library.

Since this is a relatively new release, there is scarcely any information available online. The lack of online resource is more than made up for by the clear, well documented help that comes with the installation. The quickstarts are a godsend to get things up and running.

With each block your best bet is to do a quick read of that module on the help and then go through the quick starts, then get your hands dirty writing a small mock app of your own. You can download the presentation that I made from here.

Shandy, to answer your question about performance relating to the Logging block, Loren has blogged about an impromptu test he carried out comparing log4net against the Enterprise Library.

Update: Shandy posts a review of my last presentation.

Thanks a lot for everyone who came to the seminar yesterday. I hope you all saw the power and productivity gains of moving to the .NET platform. I started working with .NET nearly two years ago and have never looked back. The rest of the development world pales in comparison to what you can do with .NET.

As promised you can download the presentation and code from here.

I feel that not a lot of developers in Sri Lanka know enough about .NET. .NET is going to one of the key development skills required in the future. We Sri Lankans need to master these technologies to keep our competitive edge over our conterparts from India and other countries.

I'm trying to do my little part by holding seminars. I would really love to hear back from you all on the seminar and your ideas on how we can improve it. Please click on the Comment link below to leave your comments (especially the constructive criticisms) or email me at mail@merill.net.

Okay folks here are the downloads to the presentation (2.7MB) and the code samples (120KB) that I promised at yesterday's seminar. You can also download the same stuff directly from GDN.

It was great to see so many people interested in .NET and I have already got some really excellent feedback by mail. There was just one hitch during presentation when I wasn't able to demo the data access code due to a SQL Server issue. Apparently Windows Server 2003 only supports SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 3 and above.

Anyway I would love to hear more feedback from everyone who came for the seminar including the shortcomings so that I can improve on the next one. You can mail me at mail@merill.net or click on the Add Comment link below to enter your comments.

The next seminar will be on migrating applications from Visual Basic 6/COM to Visual Basic .NET at 5.30pm on the 15th of September.

The next course that I will be starting at Gateway on 20 Sep (Sat) will be on Programming with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET, you can even download the first two modules in the course from the course page at Microsoft.

Update: It looks like my hosting provider doesn't let me keep zip files for downloading, I will try to put up the files in another location and let you know once the url is fixed. 

Update: The links to the presentation and code files are working now.