Ian Cooper gave a presentation last night's London .NET User Group on Data Mapping Patterns in .NET.  He explained many of the patterns from Martin Fowler's book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.  He started with the basic Transaction Script pattern through to the Table Model and finally the Domain Model.  Along the way he demoed the Data Access Application Block (which to my surprise, only half the audience admitted knowing about).

I enjoyed seeing many of these patterns shown in action using nHibernate.  I haven't looked at the ORM frameworks for a while and was pleased to see how far things have developed.  Ian recommended the book 'Hibernate in Aciton' by Christian Bauer and Gavin King as a good introduction.  You can read a sample chapter and a book review on theserverside.com.

Ian's main point was that you should look to use nHibernate or another existing ORM tool rather than writing your own (avoid the ORM Vietnam issue that Ted Neward mentions), but to be careful not to see ORM tools as a hammer that makes all problems look nails.

Graham Parker, the retiring VBUG Chairman, was on before Ian talking about Java and .NET Interoperability.  I missed the start of the session but there was lot of good discussion from the attendees.  A large number of people  were aware of the Mono project and it's recent developments such as support for ASP.NET, Windows.Forms and ADO.NET.  There was also discussion about how Source Forge Source Gear are using Mono for their Vault commercial product.

Max Kington chipped in from the floor with a number of good insights based on his experience with Java.  I had a good chat with him afterwards on a range of topics from grid computing, web services to his claim that '2005 is the year of the domain specific language'.

All up another good LDNUG event.  Ingo Rammer is going to speak at the next event on Wednesday 23 February!