Thanks again to Kate (she sure helps funnel good info for me), I see that Microsoft is sponsoring a contest to win a full paid trip to this [Microsoft sponsored?] summit.

You need to be a software developer chick (sorry guys), live in one of these 5 countries: Austria, Denmark, France, Germany or the UK, and not work for Microsoft.

The submission is an essay and due by April 2.

Check it out here.

The stars have aligned and I'm going to MIX07.

I am ignoring the fact that this is going to mean a whole lot of flying . In a 5 week period I will fly to Orlando and back (from Vermont), then to Seattle and back and then to Las Vegas and back. Oy, silly me.

VB9 has come a long way in the new March CTP of Orcas! Paul Vick has a quick list of what is now in there. And there are a lot of good details in the msdn documentaiton that comes along with the CTP.

A few things I noticed quickly when bringing my LINQ for SQL demos over to the new bits.

• First, and happily, the named parameter syntax of := is no longer necessary. You can just type =, like a normal person.
• You need to be explicit about using the reference to the entity when refering to properties. In other words where I could say
   From s In db.Suppliers_
              Where CompanyName = "Exotic Liquids" ...
  I now need to put  "s." in front of the CompanyName property
• The anonymous types have been fleshed out more and you need to use the With keyword when creating one.
• Also in the anonymous types, when you are definining a new named parameter, you need the "." in front of that parameter, so it is obviously a property of the anonymous type.
• Maybe this isn't the ultimate way to do it, but it seems that if you want to further leverage one of the properties of that anonymous type, eg to order on, then you need to name the anonymous type and reference it in the order by clause. Again, maybe this isn't THE way, but it's the way I got my code working again.

Here's a before (as in earlier CTP) and an after (March CTP) example of a simple query that does all of these things.

OLD
From s In db.Suppliers _
            Select New {Company := CompanyName, Country, Products}

NEW
From s In db.Suppliers _
            Select New With {.Company = s.CompanyName, s.Country, s.Products}

Here's what it looks like with a nested query
  From s In db.Suppliers _
            Select New With {.Company = s.CompanyName, s.Country, _
            .Products = (From p In s.Products _
                Select New With {p.ProductName})}

OLD with Order By
From s In db.Suppliers _
            Select New {s.CompanyName, s.Country, s.Products} _
            Order By CompanyName

NEW with Order By
  Dim mylist = From s In db.Suppliers _
            Select s2 = New With {s.CompanyName, s.Country, s.Products} _
            Order By s2.CompanyName

I've seen samples where "s" has been used for both the reference to the items in the db.suppliers collection AND to the name of the new anonymous type. That scares me, so I used a new variable (s2).

There is also a whole new set of query samples in the MSDN documentation.

Yesterday I proclaimed that today would be a powder day - regardless of how much work I have to do. We had a forecast of 7-12 inches of new snow.

The promised snow started before we went to bed last night.

But when I woke up in the middle of the night to a howling wind and then again this morning to the same, I knew it would be another productive day in front of the computer. It's wild out there. Rich is still heading out to the ski hill. He's insane. I certainly wouldn't want to be sitting in the chair lift in this weather.

It's what he refers to as a "character building day." That's an old joke from when he worked for a builder that, even in the winter, had his crew arrive at 6am and work until 4pm. Even when it was 5 degrees out and all then ended up doing was shoveling snow out of the foundation. I'd last about five minutes in a job like that. Give me my cozy office chair any day!

Expecting some new snow overnight and tomorrow.  Yay. We will go do some runs in the morning. I'm currently averaging about $50/run based on the cost of my midweek pass and the number of runs I've managed to get in this year.

The ADO NET Team has been cranking out fab content on their blog. Brian Dawson just wrote a post all about Object Services.

In trying to sort out all of the options that we now have with Entity Framework and LINQ, I'm always happy to see a list like this. But go read the whole post so nothing is out of context

What can you do with Object Services?

Here’s a bullet list of some of the normal operations which object services can provide:

·         Query using LINQ or Entity SQL

·         CRUD

·         State Management – change tracking with events

·         Lazy loading

·         Inheritance

·         Navigating relationships

More features of Object Services allow for data conflicts resolution. For example, Object Services supports:

·         Optimistic concurrency

·         Identity resolution -  keeping on copy of the object even from several different queries

·         Merging

·         Refreshing data with overwrite options (ie: server wins or client wins)

I will be speaking in Albany NY at TechValley.NET on March 12th about ADO.NET Orcas.

In April I will be doing a two city tour speaking at Bellingham.NET (a group led by Andrew Robinson, that is a brand new member of INETA) and then at South Sound .NET in Olympia, Washington run by my old INETA pal, Paul Mehner (with help from another pal, Camey Combs.)

In between these two trips, I'll be at DevConnections in Orlando and Code Camp 7 in Waltham, Mass. I guess "travel season" is starting!

I'm looking forward to all of these trips! Now back to that new CTP release.

After reading this in the Free Press, I had a great idea what we can do with any funds coming to Vermont - support the high tech industry here! How fitting.

Vermont shares in $90 million settlement with Samsung

Published: Wednesday, February 7, 2007
MONTPELIER - Vermont is one of 40 states to settle with electronics manufacturer Samsung in an antitrust lawsuit, Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell announced this week.

The $90 million nationwide settlement with Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. arose from a claim of a price-fixing scheme among Samsung and several other of the world's largest computer memory chip manufacturers that began in the 1990s.

The settlement, which is still subject to a court review, does not yet detail how the money will be meted out among the suit's participating states and consumers.

Here's a recent opinion piece in the local paper about the importance of Green businesses in Vermont. I keep harping about how green the software industry is at VTSDA meetings and want to get the state to include us in all of their efforts around promoting green industry here. It's so good for Vermont. I will eventually get my message through!

From the Feb 23 Legislative Report of the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce

David Winslow, CEO and President of EpikOne, Inc. was recruited by the Chamber and GBIC to testify from a businessperson’s perspective about what business expects from our educational and workforce development systems.  David’s story of being an underachieving high school student to becoming an entrepreneur who owns a knowledge-based technology business employing 15 people fascinated both the House Commerce and Education committees.  The Committee members peppered him with questions about his experiences and what can be done to foster other entrepreneurial-minded young people. The essence of his testimony was that the education system should expose students to business during high school, encourage skills-based training and internships and better align the curriculum with the business needs and technology of today. He also spoke of the need for businesspersons to become more involved in the educational system to provide these opportunities.

From the Burlington Free Press an interesting look at Vermont's "lopsided" economic evolution:

Vermont is the most entrepreneurial state in the country, according to the study. However, Vermont is last in creating high-wage service jobs; the service industry includes restaurant positions, financial and legal services, publishing and advertising. Connecticut, Delaware and New York lead this category.

Read the full article here

I saw mention of this new version of the command line tool in this forum post so I went looking in the MarchCTP. I modified some of the desciriptions a little to fit them onto a powerpoint slide, so this is a tad different than the real tihng

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5.20209>edmgen /help


Microsoft (R) EdmGen version 2.0.0.0
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 2006. All rights reserved.

                                           EdmGen Options
/mode:ValidateArtifacts                 Validate the ssdl, msl, and csdl files
/mode:FullGeneration                    Generate ssdl, msl, csdl, and objects from the database
/mode:FromSsdlGeneration                Generate msl, csdl, and objects from an ssdl file
/mode:EntityClassGeneration             Generate objects from a csdl file
/mode:ViewGeneration                    Generate mapping views from ssdl, msl, and csdl files
/project:<string>                       The base name to be used for all the artifact files (short form: /p)
/connectionstring:<connection string>   The connection string to the database that you would like to connect to (short form: /c)
/incsdl:<file>                          The file to read the conceptual model from
/inmsl:<file>                           The file to read the mapping from
/inssdl:<file>                          The file to read the storage model from
/outcsdl:<file>                         The file to write the generated conceptual model to
/outmsl:<file>                          The file to write the generated mapping to
/outssdl:<file>                         The file to write the generated storage model to
/outobjectlayer:<file>                  The file to write the generated object layer to
/outviews:<file>                        The file to write the pre generated view objects to
/language:Vb                            Generate code using the VB language
/language:CSharp                        Generate code using the C# language
/namespace:<string>                     The namespace name to use for the conceptual modely types
/entitycontainer:<string>               The name to use for the EntityContainer in the conceptual model
/help                                   Display the usage message (short form: /?)
/nologo                                 Suppress copyright message

This  month's desktop calendar is really nice. They are done by photographer Paul Hansen of ecopixel for the Green Mountain Club.

read all about it....

[A DevLife post]

There are dreams that are common for people; the one where you are flying, the one where you suddenly realize you have no clothes on and the one where you walk into college or high school class and there is a big test and you realize you haven't been to any classes all year.

Since I've been speaking at conferences, the last one of those has shifted, not once but twice.

I have often dreamt that I walked into a room to do a conference session and realized I hadn't even prepared it!

Last night I dreamt that I gave a new talk at a user group and was about to give it again about 1/2 hour later. I thought the talk had gone really well. While I was setting up to do the 2nd iteration of the talk, I asked someone (I think it was Dave Noderer) how he thought the first talk went. "Okay," he told me, "but I think it would have been nice if you had done some demos."

Luckily something woke me up from my sleep while I was trying to figure out how I was going to solve this problem with only about 10 minutes before the session started.

I do actually have a talk that is totally codeless; it is a session that explains some basic security concepts. But in this dream, I was doing a talk on ADO.NET, so no code demos probably wasn't such a good thing.

In December, Deer Leap Books in Bristol VT , a wonderful local independent bookstore, closed it's doors. It wasn't for lack of local support, but it still wasn't enough to compete with Amazon, etc.

Today, I saw in the local paper that another fabulous indy bookstore, The Book Rack & Children's Pages (this one in Essex, VT) is also closing. Very sad. I thought their formula was strong enough to keep them going. (Here's the article.)

These are wonderful community places. The store's owner is going to get involved with a recently formed organization called Local First Vermont, to help other Vermont businesses.

The Flynn is our major arts center in Burlington. They have an urgent need for some tech support. If you know anyone that can fill this, send them their way!

Flynn Center for the Performing Arts

Computer Support Assistant

Job Description

This is a temporary job needed immediately. This person will be responsible for on-site user support for various software and hardware related issues. We are looking for someone who has enough technical knowledge to relieve some of the technical support issues from the current staff. Some data entry may be required. The qualifications for this job include:

·        Experience supporting users in a variety of applications including Microsoft Word, Excel, and Outlook. 

·        Experience with Windows XP and Windows 2003. Experience with Macintosh OS helpful.

·        Experience supporting a variety of hardware issues including HP printer support.

·        Excellent troubleshooting and decision-making skills.

·        Strong communication skills and ability to prioritize and multitask.

High School Diploma and experience in Information Technology is a must.

30-40 hours per week, for 3-6 months.  Flexibility with schedule possible.

Send resume and cover letter to:

Carol Custard

Systems Support Specialist

Flynn Center for the Performing Arts

153 Main Street

Burlington, VT 05401

Rev 01/29/07

Frances Allen's Turing award has rightfully created a big buzz as she is the first female in the award's 40 year history to get this incredibly prestigous technology award. (I love Larry O'Brien's comment about Grace Hopper (which Kate pointed out to me)!)

But you probably didn't hear that the Vermont Engineer of the Year award, which has been in place for 46 years went to its' first female recipient this year, too.

Katherine Norris worked at IBM for 38 years. She started in Fishkill in 1967 and moved up to Vermont to work at the IBM plant eleven years later. She retired only last year.

Can you imagine being a woman in Engineering at MIT in the 60's? That's not just engeineering, it's pioneering!

Read more in this Burlington Free Press article.

Yah - sounds like a paid message but really, I'm so loving PPT 2007. Here's one reason why...

[A DevLife post]

Did I really forget to blog this? I know I have sent out emails to VTdotNET members, but we now have TWO MSDN events in March right here in Burlington.

In addition to the "classic" MSDN event on March 13th (Vista/.NET 3.0/Office 2007 Development) [register here: http://www.msdnevents.com/march/]

...

there is the Chris & Bob Road Show.

Chris Bowen (our new D.E.) and Bob Familiar, also fo Microsoft New England, will be presenting a full day of .NET 3.0 development. It's free. it's at the sheraton. It's March 1st. Here are details and registration info.

You can thank Bove's Restaurant for this being on our schedule. Chris is an addict!