Adding a Login Form to Your Application
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Duration: 30 minutes

Abstract: We show you a simple login form that looks up a hashed password in the database.

Description: You are already using a login form for your current application, but you are not sure you are applying best security practices. We illustrate how to put the password checking algorithm into a class that resides on the middle tier where it is more secure, as well as discuss a number of security related issues such as recommended hashing algorithms, adding salt to your password hash, and preventing snooping over the wire.

Featured Speaker: David Klitzke

Build an Application in Minutes
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Duration: 30 minutes

Abstract: We build an Employee Viewer in 10 minutes using IdeaBlade.

Description: You can get going with .NET development quickly and intuitively with the Rapid Application Development features of the IdeaBlade product. We show you by example. We also identify where you might go from there for a full enterprise solution and field your questions about what is really happening.

Featured Speaker: Ward Bell

Creating Reports with Developer Express XtraReports
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Duration: 30 minutes

Abstract: Learn how to create reports for your IdeaBlade application using the Developer Express XtraReports suite, a report using XtraReports you will see how to create a report using XtraReports.

Description: Many IdeaBlade customers use the Developer Express .NET controls to enhance the user interface of their applications. Among these controls is an excellent suite of reporting tools known as XtraReports. Unlike some reporting tools, an XtraReport is happy to accommodate a list of objects (rather than a database or .NET DataSet) as its data source so it permits you to extend your fully object-oriented development approach to the realm of report creation. In this webinar, you will see how to create a report for an IdeaBlade application using XtraReports.

Featured Speaker: Greg Dunn

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Deployment using IIS
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Duration: 30 minutes

Abstract: We show you a simple setup project that deploys your application over the Internet.

Description: You want to deploy your application over the Internet, and you know that you will be using IIS. However, you have heard that IIS deployments are complex, confusing, and notoriously difficult to debug. Using our long experience with IIS deployments, we demonstrate how to use template classes to build an IIS Deployment setup project in a minimum amount of time. We have eliminated a number of steps normally associated with IIS deployments to make your deployment experience short and felicitous. To conclude, we show you some tools and debugging techniques in the event you do run into problems.

Featured Speaker: Jim Baron, David Klitzke

Dynamic Properties
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Duration: 30 minutes

Abstract: How do you create new properties for your business objects within the UI without modifying the business objects themselves? We explain why you really need to know how to do this.

Description: We first learn to enrich our business objects with new public properties, for example "Age". We next populate a BindableList with business objects and bind these new, custom properties to controls and grid columns. The message here is to put business logic into the business object and expose it in the UI through databinding.
But what if the logic does not belong in the business model? What if it is pure UI? Suppose you want to display a red ball if the employee status is "bad" and a green ball if the status is "good". You could add a "StatusImage" property to the Employee class, but this would feel wrong. The graphic images for red and green balls are display elements. They vary with the UI and there is no "business" role mandating any image at all. What if your UI could pretend that "StatusImage" is a property of Employee? It can!
We show you how to add "StatusImage" to the BindableList that holds the Employee. The BindableList is a proper UI object, external to the business object model. Thus, we bind to this dynamically-created UI property as if it were "LastName" or "Age."

Featured Speaker: Ward Bell

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Easy State-of-the-Art Application Development With DevForce
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Duration: 30 minutes

Abstract: See an DevForce-based Smart Client application that delivers state-of-the-art functionality; then download the source code and see how incredibly easy it was to provide it!

Description: This webinar demonstrates an DevForce-based application that implements numerous powerful, state-of-the-art features that are made easy to provide with the support of IdeaBlade. The source code for the application is available on the IdeaBlade web site for free download. Features illustrated include data caching & UI synchronization of changes to data; concurrency violation handling; disconnected use; undoing changes; query-by-example; using inherited forms to speed development and provide a consistent look-and-feel; and auto-update to keep installations of your application at the current version.

Featured Speaker: Ward Bell

Enabling Optimistic Concurrency
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Duration: 30 minutes

Abstract: We show you a simple way to enable optimistic concurrency using the IdeaBlade Object Relational Mapping (ORM) tool.

Description: You have built an application using ADO.NET that implements optimistic concurrency. However, your database saves are performing poorly because ADO.NET is comparing all of the columns in your tables. You have heard that there is a better way to implement optimistic concurrency, but you do not know how to write the complex SQL required to do this. We demonstrate how to build a high performance solution that enables optimistic concurrency without having to change a single line of code in your application using the IdeaBlade ORM tool.

Featured Speaker: David Klitzke

ID Generation in DevForce
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Duration: 30 minutes

Abstract: IdeaBlade includes facilities that solve the problem of ID conflicts no matter what scheme the back-end database uses to generate IDs. Support for identity columns is now automatic (along with GUIDS, of course). But custom ID schemes can also be accomodated easily. In this webinar you will see how easy it is, in DevForce, to accommodate any ID generation scheme whatsoever, so that your users can safely work without a live connection to your database.

Description: Database tables can be, and are, designed using many different schemes for ID (primary key) generation. Some use GUIDs; some use identity keys; and some use specialized home-grown schemes that can be almost anything. In apps that support client side processing and even disconnected operation, IDs generated locally have the potential to conflict with IDs generated locally by other users during the same time period. GUIDs solve the problem, but many developers either cannot use GUIDs (because the database already exists or is not under their design control) or don?t like them because of their low readability.

Featured Speaker: Ward Bell

Integration with Microsoft Office
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Duration: 30 minutes

Abstract: For many customers, Microsoft Excel is the preferred application for managing and analyzing data. We show you how to use IdeaBlade to enhance your existing Microsoft Excel applications.

Description: You are annoyed by the clumsiness of importing orders from a remote database into your favorite Excel spreadsheet application because you first have to write a custom application with SQL statements to collect the data. We demonstrate how to build a custom query written with an IdeaBlade Query-by-Example form to select the orders you want, and then automatically import them into your spreadsheet. As an added bonus, we put the data into a bar chart that shows your top sales reps.

Featured Speaker: David Klitzke

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Object-Relational Stored Procedures for Aggregate Entities
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Duration: 30 minutes

Abstract: We illustrate how summary or aggregate objects can be implemented with stored procedures.

Description: Your application needs to report statistics across a particular sub-population of Orders. Perhaps you need the quantity and dollar volume of sales of electronic toys in each of the last 12 months by region. You cannot do this with an Object Query Language statement (RdbQuery). You considered a view, but the criteria are too dynamic. You also thought about pulling the raw data into client memory and process it there, but that could be too slow and requires programming. It is a piece of cake for a stored procedure. We show you how to use the ORM tool to generate business objects backed by a stored procedure.

Featured Speaker: David Klitzke

Object-Relational Stored Procedures for High Performance
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Duration: 30 minutes

Abstract: We demonstrate how stored procedures can improve performance on queries of table-backed objects.

Description: Perhaps your "Product" table is huge. You have devised a clever stored procedure for efficiently searching for particular products, a procedure that queries many other large tables and performs complex operations to combine results into a single list of candidate products. You have determined that this method yields a 5x improvement in search time over a finely-tuned sequence of IdeaBlade RdbQueries. We show you how you can invoke a procedure that returns what would otherwise be a normal, table-backed business object such as Product. The application can easily combine query and update strategies, using the RdbQuery and StoredProcedureQuery methods as the occasion demands.

Featured Speaker: Ward Bell

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Pre-Fetch for Better Performance
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Duration: 30 minutes

Abstract: When you present a table of Orders you know you want to display each Order's "Company" object as well. We show you how to improve UI performance dramatically by fetching those Companies at the same time.

Description: You are excited and flood a grid with 6,000 orders. However, it seems to take a long time to populate the grid in which the columns include SalesRep name and Customer name. What is up with that? We demonstrate how to look at the server log to see what is happening and notice that the application is retrieving one customer at a time. Thus, there are hundreds of trips back to the server. We learn why this is happening, and that it is expected behavior even if undesirable in this case. We then write a line or two of code to pre-fetch the customers and rerun the application which now responds in fraction of the former time. We conclude with a discussion of "spans", a new feature of IdeaBlade 3.0 for Visual Studio 2005.

Featured Speaker: Ward Bell

Securing Your Application
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Duration: 30 minutes

Abstract: We show you some techniques for authorization, authentication, confidentiality, and guarding the back door with query and save checks.

Description: Security is a huge topic. We point you toward some of the resources available in IdeaBlade and the tutorial set. We also touch upon IPersistenceLoginManager, deployment under IIS for HTTPS, and the RdbEntity's QuerySecurityCheck and SaveSecurityCheck methods.

Featured Speaker: David Klitzke

Supporting Disconnected Users
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Duration: 30 minutes

Abstract: We build an Employee Viewer in 10 minutes using DevForce.

Description: One of the great features of DevForce is its ability to support both on-line and off-line environments. We start by showing you how to build an Employee viewer that is able to store and retrieve data to and from local storage. From there, we discuss some of the design issues involved in building a disconnected application including storage choices, exception handling, concurrency, and security.

Featured Speaker: David Klitzke

VB6 to Visual Basic.NET
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Duration: 30 minutes

Abstract: We build an Employee Viewer in VB in 10 minutes using IdeaBlade.

Description: The transition to VB.NET is not automatic. It is a lot easier with IdeaBlade and IdeaBlade's approach helps guide you toward more object-oriented development without having to tame the entire .NET jungle all at once. We'll talk about our experience building enterprise applications in VB.

Featured Speaker: Kim Johnson