NWNUG will be celebrating the launch of Windows Vista at the beginning of the meeting, followed by Ken's presentation:

Application Frameworks increase the quality of code, decrease the "time to market", and, if they are configurable, decrease the cost of a change to the application and how it behaves.  Stand alone code generators create working code from templates, merging in application-specific metadata such as database schema information, to quickly produce common application functionality.  What happens when you COMBINE code generation with two of the most popular ASP.NET application frameworks available: DotNetNuke and Microsoft's recently release ASP.NET AJAX?  Come find out.

DotNetNuke (http://www.dotnetnuke.com) provides a security, performance and GUI framework for web applications - allowing software developers to focus on application specific functionality by building "modules" that plug into the framework and to be configured through the browser in various configurations.

ASP.NET AJAX (http://ajax.asp.net) allows rich User Interface experiences using DHTML, JavaScript and asynchronous XML-based HTTP requests allowing only those portions of the page that actually change to update - eliminating the "erase and refresh" UI experience with traditional web applications.

We will demonstrate the generation of DotNetNuke application-specific modules that utilize ASP.NET AJAX to provide a highly configurable, rich User experience - all without coding.  The generated modules support DotNetNuke's module settings ability to allow the modules to behave differently on different pages of the site.  In addition to being able to configure each module, each control WITHIN the module can be configured via the browser (in DNN) as well, giving fine-grained configurability to modules with the DotNetNuke application.

Ken Kutz is Senior Manager of Web Development for HCR Manor Care and has been connecting web pages to databases since Netscape was the leader in that space in the 90s.  Ken has over 20 years of IT experience.

Reuben Ahmed is a developer for HCR Manor Care currently specializing in the development of reusable web application frameworks.  Using the code generator being presented, he has had his hand in developing approximately 50 web applications in the past 5 years.