Microsoft DevDays 2009, which was organised in Malta last month at Hilton, Portomaso, is an annual initiative targeted at all developers, architects and other IT specialists who would like to broaden their knowledge on the Microsoft development platform.

A holistic overview of the technologies, products and approaches was provided, with presentations on:

• Products such as .NET Framework, Silverlight, Internet Explorer 8, Windows Vista, Windows Mobile and Visual Studio

• Key functionalities such as Windows Server, Biztalk Server and SharePoint Server

• Architecture concepts such as S+S and SOA

As a leading Microsoft software solution provider within the local scenario, Exigy was invited to contribute its knowledge and expertise to this conference. Representatives from the company’s Enterprise Solutions Department delivered presentations on Microsoft Enterprise Library Application Blocks.

In the course of the introductory presentation, application blocks libraries were identified as solutions that, based on best practice design, help users address their most common and repetitive development needs. The arguments presented in this introductory speech were further explained in more technical demonstrations of the validation, caching and logging application blocks.

The benefits from each application block were presented and further sustained through demos. The validation application block enables separation of the validation logic from the core business logic by providing a set of classes to enable validation over .NET data types. The caching application block enhances the applications’ capabilities to survive system failures and improve performance by storing relevant data as close as possible to the data customer. The logging application block facilitates the population of a log message, tracing activities and enables configuration from a central location.