Perfect snow. We got about 18" of dense snow between Friday and Saturday. (I know, bad for drivers, bad for travellers, bad for a lot of people, but suh-wheeeeeet for skiers!) Then overnight last night we got another 8+ inches of the lightest fluffiest snow in the world. Yesterday Rich and I went out in our snowshoes and packed our ski trail down in the woods. Today will be the payoff as we get to ski in the fluffy fluffy fluff this afternoon.

Now that I have Vista on my main development machine, I have had a chance to test out the variety of collaboration tools that I use in my work. Here's a post I wrote about what is compatible, what isn't and the status of compatibile updates from vendors.

[A DevLife post]

Last week, I inaugurated my ADO.NET Orcas Overview at the TEchValley.NET User Group in Albany NY (with thanks to INETA!!). It was a serendipitous night for me to present there as they had just moved to new digs for their meeting, a very convenient, spacious and high tech location, so they packed the room!

The purpose of this presentation is to introduce developers to the Entity Framework and to LINQ for ADO.NET (that's the umbrella term for LINQ to SQL, LINQ to DataSets and LINQ to Entities) and while it sounds like a short list, it's a LOT to cover in one session. Especially if you don't want to just do some marketing. Developer's want to see code, but there is a lot of high level explaining to do up front, which takes time. Yet, I can't help wanting to desconstruct the Entity Data Model schema files, try to show different ways of designing a conceptual layer, and then the many ways of getting data out of the entity framework as well as using LINQ to SQL (a huge topic all on it's own) and LINQ to DataSets (another good sized topic, if you like DataSets, which I do!). Minimally, a day would be good to start with.

Before I opened up the schema files, I asked "so, who here is comfortable working with XML, anyway?". I was surprised that 1/3 of the hands went up. This is a smart group of developers who challenged me with a lot of awesome questions! (Though there was a big sigh of relief when I mentioned LINQ to XML and LINQ to XSD for those of use who live in fear of XPath!)

I laughed at John Papa's recent blog post where he bemoans the difficulty of cramming the same list of info into an article he is writing for MSDN Magazine. John and I have been providing lots of moral support to each other as we attempt to wade through Entity Framework and the LINQ flavors that are involved with data access. I was happy to finally meet John in person at the meeting, as well. (A local yokel!)

The most laughable part of my session was when, after constantly checking my watch to gauge how much time I had left (and being surprised, at each check, how well I was doing with the time), I realized that I hadn't changed the time on my watch for the early daylight savings time. I didn't have 1.5 hours to go, but only 1/2 hour! While I had planned to do a 2 hour session (user groups are a little more amenable to this than conferences where you are on a tight schedule), I think that, not counting the short break we took, I managed to wrap up in 2 hours and 15 minutes - and nearly everyone stayed! But what's new? (Hey, you've got me there, take advantage of it! )

The next day, I had a three hour drive home, immediately followed by a GeekSpeak webcast on the same topic, but for only one hour. My favorite part of this format was that whenever I was starting to go on and on about one particular piece of the Entity Framework (can't be helped as I find it fascinating - sick, huh?), Susan would steer me to the next stage of the discussion. Boy, would I love to have Susan with me while I'm presenting at a conference. "Okay Julie, I think 5 minutes looking at XML is more than enough... let's go look at something a little sexier, like the LINQ to SQL designer, huh?"

So next up is DevConnections, where I will be doing this session in 75 minutes (less, if I want to be able to answer questions), then on to Code Camp in Waltham, then the South Sound User Group in Olympia (after talking about LINQ to SQL In Bellingham, WA - both INETA gigs) and DevTeach in Montreal. I'm excited about all of these opportunities to introduce developers to these very cool technologies!

There is a woman in France who owns three of my parent's newfies (see them at TadoussacNewfs.com) . She is very serious about training and showing them.  These dogs have so much fun doing lots and lots of water training and showing and Bouba, the youngest of the three that came from my parents, has made a big name for himself in Europe! Today my parents told me that he is now ranked as the #2 Newfie in all of France, which in the crazy world of dog showing is a really big deal.

From the forums (this thread):

A future version of SqlMetal.exe will generate DataContract and DataMember attributes on your entities for you.  Putting them on the DataContext won't work because the DataContext is not serializable.  (Matt Warren, Microsoft)

I was looking at Vista side bar gadgets on live.com and noticed gadgets for 2008 presidential hopefuls. While Hillary and Obama's are for your myspace or live blogs where others may be somehow inspired by your early choice in candidates, the mcCain one is a sidebar gadget. So if I were a McCain supporter, i could share that fact with my dogs, cat and husband who are the only ones that might be in my office.

There are about 350 people already registered for Code Camp in Waltham, MA Mar 31-Apr 1st. There is also room for more sessions! I just added a chalk talk because I thought it would be fun to open up the Entity Data Model schemas and explain what the heck is going on there.

You do not have to have a completely prepared powerpoint presentation to do a chalk talk. Just an idea, a computer and some working knowledge of the topic and then just go with the flow, which is driven by everyone in the room.

CODE CAMP 7 - more info here

There are some great questions bubbling up in the forums. THe ADO.NET team is busy in these discussions as well as writing some good blog posts on Entity Framework. Here's the current run down...

[A DevLife post]

Kate Gregory pointed to a blog post by Microsoftie, Darren Strange, who just plain old had a bad day. An experienced presenter, he was well aware that he was in a downward spiral, but just couldn't seem to do anything about it. (Probably not as bad as what he describes.) The hardest part about when talks go south is picking up your ego and moving ahead.

I had a horrible conference experience (that I considered confessing to, but decided to keep a little bit of my pride in tact) and not only had to face myself (and my scores, and the people who had so kindly brought me to speak at the conference) but I had to present a week later at another conference, a sizable one, at that. Believe me, I did not want to. Not at all. But of course, I had a commitment to fulfill and I had to work hard to find the courage to go forward with it.

This was really really hard to do. It made me question if I should even be presenting. (Okay, I question that prior to every speaking commitment I have ever made (and after reading one negative eval, even if it's surrounded by many positive ones).)

My choices were to just go totally dark or turn my bad bad experience into a series of lessons. I thought long and hard about everything that did not go well, the reason for each of these problems and what I was going to do from then on to avoid each and every one of them.

I was also fortunate to have the ears (and the shoulders) of other folks who do a lot of presenting (such as Kate) to pat my poor ego a little and remind me why I present in the first place - because I really love sharing what I have learned.

I stress out prior to every opportunity I have to humiliate myself publically. Wouldn't you?  

Susan Wisowaty and Glen Gordon were angels earlier this week when the normally routine (2 minute) installation of Live Meeting that I had inevitably put off (this wasn't my plan, of course) to only 1/2 hour prior to the GeekSpeak webcast just would not work. Finally I turned off UAC, rebooted my computer, ran the install yet again and was finally ready about 30 seconds before we went live. Those two, who are serious pros, were cool as cucumbers, professing basically that it was "all good" and even if I just talked about ADO.NET without showing any code (and believe me, I could do that for  hours and hours) it would still be fun. Of course, in the end, the event flew by and it was a blast and hopefully it was beneficial for listeners.

We're really looking forward to this. Gov Douglas will be featured at the next VTSDA Meeting: A Discussion on the Vermont Software Sector and its role in Vermont's Economy.

More info at http://www.vtsda.org/meetings/

I remember trudging through piles of snow when I was little, knocking on my neighbor's doors taking (and then delivering) cookie orders.

Now if I want cookies, I have to go track them down. I just discovered that there's a list of where I can buy them all over vermont this week. (I just happened to think of it and it just happened to be this week!)

VTdotNET had our Vista launch event at last night's meeting and we had a blast. There were about 35 people there (which is a crowd for us!). TEKSystems brought us piles and piles of fabulous pizza and two VTdotNET members, Mike Soulia and Rob Rohr gave great presentation.

Mike, who owns two of our favorite local stores in Burlington (Kiss the Cook and Apple Mountain where he has built their POS system) covered WorkFlow, WCF and WPF. Mike teaches software classes at Vermont Tech as well. WF is a hard thing for many developers to grasp at first, especially when it isn't solving a big problem that they have been struggling with. There are many who see it and say "oh, what I've always needed!" and others who just don't get it. I was in the latter camp at first and could tell there were plenty feeling that way last night. One thing I like to share with folks like me is that the fact that people who I have a lot of respect for, such as Kathleen Dollard, are VERY VERY excited about WF. She is doing a full day session on it at DevConnections. I figure if Kathleen things it's huge, then it's huge and that I need to pay attention to it.

Mike built a basic hello world server and a client  to call it with WCF so people could just see the working parts, get the most basic concepts and see that it works. After this he demo's Expression Web and showed an awesome iPod-like interface that when he hovered the mouse over the center circle (moving it around the circle), the volume went up and down, just like on an iPod. Very cool stuff.

Next up was Rob, who makes the University of Vermont School of Business Administration tick. Before he got started, I made him show Flip3D on his computer. There are plenty that hadn't seen it yet, so there was a fun reaction! Rob covered Vista security and then gave us a great presentation on CardSpaces, which I think nobody in the group has seen before. There's an article on CardSpaces in MSDN Magazine this month (April and it's not online yet, but I have it in my hands!) by Michele Leroux Bustamante.

After the meeting, we raffled off the swag that Microsoft sent as part of this launch event. The highlight was five Vista Business licenses,then there were things like pens, zipper pulls and mouse pads - silly stuff. I was really pleased that a woman who lives in Souther Vermont (over 2 1/2 hours away) and has never been to a meeting before was one of the Vista winners.

Thanks to Mike and Rob for all of the work they did preparing these sessions. And thanks to Elizabeth Rudolph at TEKSystems for not only sponsoring the pizza & soda, but picking it up, bringing it to the meeting and setting it all up.

It wasn't obvious to me how to do this (hey, I've admitted worse embarrassments on this blog before...) so here's the scoop...

A DevLife post

My main machine has so many old apps on it that I don't want to install .net 3.0 there. Now that I have my other dev box set up on Vista, I can easily check out all of Charles Petzolds cool WPF demos that he posts on his blog! (Such as today's 3D shadow test.)

If you are not on the email list to receive the monthly newsletter for INETA NORAM  you can always find them at www.ineta.org/newsletters.

Scott Spradlin does a great job putting this together as editor. I do the speaker interviews each month, something I started when I was the editor. This month I got the dirt (that's dirt bike dirt) on Chris Kinsman. Check it out.

I know that this cartoon in the New Yorker this week sadly comes close to home to many people that I know.

Tomorrow night Patti Smith is being inducted into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame. Rock on.

The first three days of the week are busy ones!

On Monday, Vermont.NET is having it's Vista/.NET 3.0 Launch meeting. Local brainiacs Mike Soulia and Rob Rohr will be presenting (after months of working with the Vista Launch team as part of the big user group roll out) and we'll have 5 Windows Vista licenses to give away (plus free pizza & soda thanks to TEKSystems, who recently opened up an office in Burlington).

Tuesday is the TEchNet/MSDN Event in Burlington. It's a day of training on Vista and Office 2007 products, with the morning focused on IT Pros and the afternoon for developers. Susan emailed me yesterday to say that they will be giving away Office 2007 licenses at the MSDN event!!!

I'll be missing that though because I'll be driving down to Albany to give a presentation to the Tech Valley .NET User Group about ADO.NET Orcas. Thanks to INETA for sponsoring this trip.

Then I drive back on Wednesday do to a GeekSpeak show with Susan Wisowaty (who is doing the MSDN event on Tuesday) and Glen Gordon. They were kind enough to move the time to later in the afternoon so that I'd be back from Albany on time and ready for action.

GeekSpeak is a lot more free-form than a typical webcast and I'm not sure what to expect. I'll have the new CTP of ORCAS open and I guess we'll poke around Entity Framework and the three LINQ to ADO.NET techs (LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities nad LINQ to DataSet). And the most fun part is that I'll be doing this with hosts Glen Gordon (who I did a webcast with on ADO.NET 2.0 topic a few years ago) and Susan Wisowaty (who lives right here in Burlington!), from the MSDN Events team.

More info and registration here

I'm building out two Vista boxes today. One is a new tablet and the other is my Dell XS280 with a brand new hard drive. Read more...

A DevLife post