Update: the second presenter's name is Greg Young.
Having recently moved to Atlanta, I visited the Atlanta .NET Users Group last week and the Atlanta C# Users Group last night. It's nice to see a cohesive community here.
The .NET meeting was about how to secure Remote Desktop (in a word: VPN) and an intro to code generation with CodeSmith. It wasn't discussed directly, but there are certainly guidelines on how to do code generation the right way. Maybe I can expand this later with some of what was discussed. It was a nice meeting. The next night I met Kirk Evans, a Microsoft Technology Evangelist here in Atlanta. That was a great meeting. He not only is the Tech Evangelist for my new client, he actually knew my moniker on by blog. I didn't know such an animal existed! Good to meet you, Kirk!
Last night's C# users group was no less interesting. Mitch Harpur had a great introduction to .Net 2.0's System.Configuration library. Highly recommended. I've tended to prefer Database-based configuration databases. You always need a local cache option for that however (say, for the database connection string, maybe?). It's also not very xcopy deployable. SQL Server Express (SSE) may change the whole picture, however. Two benefits to using config files are the cascading nature of the enterprise, machine, user, app config files that operations can take advantage of and, possibly, the Enterprise Library 2.0 configuration tool. I'll be evaluating whether it gives an adequate experience for Ops folks. A key tidbit in the presentation was that .Net 2.0 config files fully support inclusion, which could be a boon for enterprise applications that have to move through promotion between several environments (Dev, QA, Prod, for example). You can just sequester deployment environment settings and switch out the one that you need for a particular environment. Repeatability is good.
There was also a great intro to the Factory and Singleton design patterns, by Greg Young. In the meeting I mentioned two MSDN Mag articles. I thought I would post them here. The first is an article on Dependency Injection. The Factory Pattern is used often as a means to Dependency Injection. Greg's reaction was similar to my first "aha" reaction: why bother giving a new name for something that are inherent to many patterns? I've found it useful, however, to discuss the intent of Dependency Injection when a client wants to have lower level functionality dependant on higher level functionality. Software is like an onion, but software with dependency injection is like an onion with call backs. :-)
The second article is a rather opaque article on the .Net 2.0 Memory Model. Greg mentioned that the singleton pattern in .NET can be accomplished with a static (Shared in Visual Basic) member with a object creation initializer. I though the article spoke to the issue, but it looks like it does not. Is is a great article on optimizing multithreaded accesses, in general, however. I'm not sure how the MSR article I've linked to previously relates to the .NET 2.0 model, either. Oh and here's another Brad Abram's posting that I've referenced before that says that using the static members may not be enough. So there you have it.