I give in.

For years, every time a publisher has asked me "so Julie, when are you going to write a book for us?" I had my answer ready. "I'll do it when you are prepared to give me a $50,000 advance, come to my house weekly to cook dinner and clean the house and also pay for a full year of marriage counseling." So they finally go the point of my not-really-that-funny joke and stopped asking.

Then Microsoft went and created this thing called Entity Framework which intrigued me... a lot. I played with it and learned plenty about it. I wrote some articles which were extremely frustrating because they have a limitation on how long they can be. I have been speak at conferences and user groups about it for over a year, but can never fit everything I want to say in a 60 or 75 minute slot (finally I'm doing full day sessions at a few conferences!). I have written a gazillion blog posts about it and answered lots of questions in the forums.

But still I wasn't happy. Entity Framework was leaking out of me and I could not satisfy my need to talk and write about it.

So I finally gave in and talked to a few publishers and said that it was time.

I am now writing a book for O'Reilly called "Programming Entity Framework". I have actually started writing it already and am hoping to have it in print in October. This gives me a short time frame to write it in since there are about 3 monhts needed for the actual production of the book so it has to be done by then.

Call me crazy. But, really, I was going to self-combust otherwise. I'm so happy having a valid excuse to play with Entity Framework every day now.

There is a much bigger problem though with this. It's not that my husband and I will probably be eating spaghetti for the next 4 months or the dust bunnies that will be taking over our house.

The problem is that the animal which I really want to have on my cover has been used already for a VBA book (which I have). Of course, that would be a Newfoundland dog. How perfect is a dog? Isn't data an old faithful friend? And we're teaching it some new tricks with Entity Framework! Maybe we could have a write-in campaign to convince them to let me have another Newfie!

Anyway, until there is an official cover, I have invented this one for myself: