Tonight's VTdotNET meeting is a little different for us "must focus on business apps" VTdotNETters. Griff Townsend is coming up from Albany where he has done two XNA sessions (2-D and then 3-D) at the user group there.

I think it will be a lot of fun to open up our eyes to new ways (reasons for) programming. I am hoping that we'll be able to draw some of the students from Champlain College's Game Development degree program.

www.vtdotnet.org for more info....

I realized that I am somewhat like a sailor with a girl in every port, except that I'm a girl with a geek in every port.  When I learned that the weather might prevent me from flying the last leg of my trip home from Seattle last night (Seattle to Washington, then to Burlington), I didn't even have to think for more than a moment who I knew in the area. Andrew Duthie and his ever so lovely (and recently expanded) family live close to Dulles. Talk about a friend; he even came to pick me up at the airport! I got to visit briefly with their 4 yr old who Andrew and Jennifer woke up just long enough for a "hi" (Joseph and I fell hard for each other last time I visited). Wireless, a comfy bed, a beautiful new baby to meet. And happily for me, Andrew has recently become slightly obsessed with making the perfect cup of coffee, which I got to sample before we headed back to the airport this morning. Pretty convenient that he had a flight out this morning too.  

Thanks so much to INETA , Andy Robinson (leader of Bellingham.NET) and Paul Mehner and Camey Combs from South Sound .NET for getting me out to the Seattle area to present at their user groups.

I did a session on LINQ to SQL in Web Apps in Bellingham on Wednesday night after spending 17 hours trying to get there. (Snowstorm in Chicago - more details about that crazy flight here…)  I was amazed that people stuck around to wait for me since I didn't arrive until about 7:45! I did my session from 8 - 10pm and then drove down to Olympia with Paul Mehner who had filled in and did a full workflow session while I was trying to make my way up to Bellingham (what  a gorgeous flight!). I was up for 23 straight hours that day and between the adrenaline and my love for presenting, I think I surprised these guys that I was doing this session from what my body clock defined as 11pm - 1am!

The next night I presented at the user group in Olympia.  This is the first time I recall a user group meeting that served something other than pizza! Camey had gone to Costco and we had sandwiches, chips, soda and chocolate chip cookies. Mmmmm.

This is the 4th time I've taught this session on what's coming up in ADO.NET in the next Visual studio which translates to Entity Framework and the data access integration with LINQ. It's all so new to most people and there is so much to show. From explaining the concept and purpose behind the entity model, to inspecting the schema files, laying out the various uses and of course, looking at Object Services, Entity client, Entity SQL and LINQ to Entities. Not to mention LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Datasets. It really is just way too much for one session and frustrating to figure out what to show without leaving out key information. In this session, there was a lot of interest in the actual schema files (and it is really important to take the time to understanding them if you want to really leverage Efs potential) so we spent a good amount of time in that space.

All in all, I think I whetted the appetites and curiosity of most of the folks at the meeting and that is really the best I can hope for in such a short amount of time.

On Friday I drove up to Microsoft (1 hour up, 3 hours back in rush hour traffic!) with my bag filled with Vermont Maple Syrup and goodies from Lake Champlain Chocolates and had some great meetings with some of my buddies on the ADO.NET team as well as the Mobility team (that's TabletPC and more).

After this, I was actually on a mini vacation! And now I'm in a plane flying east in to what promises to be some pretty nasty storms. We'll see how that goes….

Update - not quite home yet. When I do get home, I will post the links to the demos and powerpoints.

It seems each time I start to write a post about the 7th New England Code Camp ("Deer in the Headlights")  that was at the beginning of April, something has gotten in the way. But once again, this event was a blast and a great success. I drove down to Boston with Dave Burke and Laura Blood who were subjected to a much longer than expected business call that I had to be on. We also lucked out with the weather. The last time we had a code camp in Boston in march there was a pretty bad snowstorm (poor Dave crashed his car on the way down).

Chris Bowen and Chris Pels pulled off another great weekend. The schedule was packed for two days. Jason Haley, who cam ALL the way cross-country for this (and to visit friends and family) pulled together coffee and donuts for Saturday morning. Since I had to do a session first thing in the morning, Chris Pels knowingly saved a few chocolate glazed donut holes for me. Mmmmmm.

I did two sessions (LINQ to SQL in Web Apps and an Intro to ADO.NET Orcas) and led a chalk talk on the Entity Framework. The chalk talk was amazingly fun to do! We were in a small room but it was packed and we spent most of the time looking at the schema files and talking about the potential of Entity Framework in enterprise apps. I've never done a chalk talk before and it was an awesome group discussion.

As always, I love sitting in on Richard Hale Shaw's talks trying to soak up not only knowledge, but learn from his teaching style as well. Richard starts with his powerpoint decks from his training classes that have something like 200+ slides in them. Then based on where the session is going, he pokes around the deck and pulls up appropriate slides to help demonstrate his points.

Naturally, a bunch of us gathered at the Westin Waltham's hotel lobby bar Saturday night and I finally had to drag my butt to bed, but it was a blast! I definitely look forward to Number 8 and curious what subtitle will be created for it.

I am currently in Seattle where I did some really fun presentations (thanks INETA) at Bellingham.NET and South Sound .NET (in Olympia) on Wednesday and Thursday. (I'll write about them in a separate post). I put off travel until April so that I could avoid winter travel problems. That didn't work out so well.

Flying to Seattle on Wednesday through O'Hare proved to be (as usual) quite a problem as Chicago had a big fat snowstorm. When we landed at O'Hare, we had to wait one and a half hours for gate. Then I got off one plane and onto another. They boarded us (huge plane) and then we sat on the runway for 3 and a half hours before taking off for Seattle! Unfortunately, arriving in Seattle over 5 hours late meant that I was unable to drive the 2+ hours to Bellingham. So I boarded a 6:50 flight to  Bellingham and actually started my presentation at 8pm! (That was 11pm my time.) Luckily, Paul Mehner had driven up and did a fabulous two hour talk on Workflow while they waited for me to arrive. So they got 2 hours of that and then 2  hours of LINQ to SQL. A double header. After this, Paul and I drove (well, Paul drove) the 3 hours south to Olympia where he lives and I stayed overnight at his family's beautiful house on the Sound.

The next night I did my talk at the Souht Sound User Group and then spent the rest of the time with Camey Combs and her family, visiting the very cool Olympia Farmer's market and being treated to a fabulous home cooked meal. I'd call it a home away from home except they don't serve food like that in my house!

Today is my trip home. I fly from Seattle to Washington D.C. and then take a small flight to Burlington. However, Burlington is expecting a major snowstorm tonight - 100% chance, sleet and snow with 5 - 9 inches expected. So I don't have high hopes of getting home tonight. I have a great back up plan to stay at Andrew Duthie's however (MSDN Dev. Evangelist in Washington D.C. area) . (All links coming but I'm typing quickly so I can go board my plane.)

So place your bets. Will I get home tonight? Will the little prop plane fly into a big snowstorm and land in burlington at 11pm? Then will I drive another 1/2 hour in the big snowstorm to my house? We'll see how it goes.

These jobs are for Competitive Computing (aka "C2"). They are a Gold Partner and have some big name clients.

C# is a must for both jobs

Senior Software Engineer/Technical Architect

We are seeking a senior level software engineer/technical architect to lead design, architecture and development of custom application development solutions for large client projects. The successful candidate will have previous experience with ASP.NET (C#) development, with a strong background in web based development, object oriented concepts, relational database design and SQL Server development.  Strong hands on application architecture and designs skills are required for the position, with excellent written and verbal communications. Previous experience on large client projects and technical presentation skills are a plus. Bachelor's degree preferred, associate's degree considered, along with 5-7 years experience in an application development environment.

This is a unique opportunity to work in a highly collaborative team environment, on large challenging client projects, and offers significant growth potential for the successful candidate.

This has been on my mind for a while.... read more

[A New DevLife Post]

Tomorrow I am flying to Seattle then speaking tomorrow night at the Bellingham.NET User Group (which is even closer to the Canadian border than where I live) and then Thursday night at South Sound.NET in Olympia.

Thanks to my pal Camey Combs for suggesting the trip and to INETA and user group leaders Paul Mehner and Andy Robinson for making it all happen. Apparently, Camey and Paul have been promoting the heck out of this.

At Bellingham, I'll be presenting on LINQ to SQL and all the fun ASP.NET databinding you can do with it. In Olympia I'll be doing a 6 hour overview of ADO.NET Orcas. Just kidding. I wish I had all that time to talk about ADO.NET! Alright, so I will try to keep it under 4 hours. No? Nobody wants to stay at a user group until 10pm. How about 2 hours? Heck, I've done it in 75 minutes and 90 minutes in the past (and 2 hours and 15 minutes also). We'll see how it goes... [evil laugh].

LOCK THE DOORS!

Yay yay yay. I am not sure when this happened, but I just discovered that Pablo Castro will be doing the keynote at DevTeach (Montreal, May 14-18) and not surprisingly, he'll be talking about the Entity Framework. More here.

We have had some gorgeous snow reappear in the past week. Friday was an historic powder day at Mad River. I went on Friday and skiid like sh*t. I was so disheartened. Rich went yesterday and came home to say it was the best skiing of the year. Since it snowed more last night and today; and since Mad River was allowing weekday pass holders to ski for free this weekend,  Rich and I went again today.

On our first run, Rich took me into the woods. I'm a bit of a scaredy cat in the woods but, while I didn't swoosh straight down through the trees, I didn't have to pause and get my courage up between every turn like I usually do. It was actually fun. And nice powder!

Then when we hit the trails, something amazing happened. I started skiing the way I know I can ski, but rarely  seem to pull off except on the groomers. I ski on telemark skis - freeheel. I switched over from being a very experienced and confident alpine skiier of 30+ (on and off) years to tele about 5 years ago but never really regained my confidence.

But today my ski legs returned and I was just bopping down the hill doing what felt right. When I looked at (and blogged about) this great video of some tele guys at Mad River from Friday earlier today, it nearly made me cry to see these guys skiing the way I know I should be skiing. Perhaps it was watching that video and keeping that in my head, rather than the image of me really sucking! Who knows. But that's how I finally got to ski today and it just feels so good!

If only I had been skiing more frequently this year and this had happened earlier, because sadly, today was the last day of the season for Mad River.

So next winter, I have to start all over again. Oh well. At least I can end this season with a big smile!

I finally noticed that Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005 corrected two of the problems that I've mentioned in previous articles and blog posts about ClickOnce. read more...

[A new DevLife post]

I was there in the incredible (not very eastern-skiing-like) powder on Friday, but didn't stay long and had to come back home for a conference call. This is how I dream of skiing, but I don't come close.

As someone who flies quite a lot, I am always interested in stories and news about airline flights. Today's CNN story about a Northwest flight out of Las Vegas being cancelled because the pilot (I can't believe this, yes the pilot!) was causing a disturbance (swearing up a storm and even at the passengers) that resulted in the police being called. Definitely something not right there and obviously, not at all normal. Talk about killing your career.

The fact that the flight was cancelled and the 180 passengers are now stuck in Las Vegas as a result of this definitely sucks.

They probably wouldn't be in the mood to watch this hilarious t.v. ad for the psycho stewardess who is trying to quit smoking. I wonder if that is what was wrong with the pilot?

I have definitely not had either of these experiences when flying.

There are a lot of us who have been looking forward to this show being posted: Daniel Simmons on ADO.NET Entity Framework. Now I have to find some time this weekend to listen to it. Roger Jennings has a fantastic analysis of the show here. While at DevConnections, Richard and Carl were talking about how much fun this show was to do. They didn't know anything about Entity Framerwork when they started and were definitely fascinated with it. I'm glad that more people are going to get exposed to EF!

Here is a link to Danny's blog.

At what point in a project do you start wanting to grab the remote and start flipping the channels? Camey Combs talks about losing that loving feeling on a recent project which, until then, had been filled with intriguing challenges. read more...

[A New DevLife Post]

Mad River Glen (which is open today since we had a big dump of snow and it's beautiful out and I'm tortured because I need to work... uggh) is going to begin a major restoration of it's historic and world famous Single Chair lift next week. To raise funds, they have been auctioning off the old chairs. The VERY LAST chair is now being auctioned off on eBay.

It's not often that one sees their name right next to Anders' (especially considering that I'm a VB programmer ), but check out this LINQ article in the  current issue of Redmond Developer News. While the focus is Anders and this great technology he and others (and always with a nod to Alan Griver) are bringing to Visual Studio .NET, I was asked to give some developer perspective.

I'd also like to say that I wasn't literally jumping up and down at PDC.

I know that I have had the same reaction when watching Scott Guthrie present on LINQ to SQL. I think I'm jumping up and down with joy, but truly my butt remained glued to the chair.

It was fun talking to Michael Schwarz about this, but I think I may have overwhelmed him with my geek technical perspective of LINQ from which he was trying to extract key points for dev managers. He seems to have done a great job.

Michael talked to another developer, VB guru Bill McCarthy who gave him a great analogy quoted at the end of the article.

A recent LINQ forum question asked about the differences between Linq to SQL and the Entity Framework.

This is the response that I wrote and thought I would surface it in my blog:

 Besides that Linq to SQL is only for SQL () one of the big differences is that the EDM is more flexible and more loosely coupled because of the 3-tiered model (conceptual layer, source schema and the mapping layer in between).  For example, you could have one conceptual layer and then multiple mapping layers that point to mulitple databases. In LINQ to SQL, your dbml properties are tightly bound directly to one particular field in a table.

While these are not in the March 2007 CTP, EDM is getting the ability to build views of the conceptual layer as well as to write stored procedures in the mapping layer. These are really cool features. I don't believe you can do this with Linq to SQL, but a) I could be mistaken and b) that may be something that is forthcoming.

In addition to Linq to Entities, Entity SQL can be used to query entities. This can be either through the object services API or the Entity CLient (the one which gives you connections/commands and results in a dbDataReader). Entity SQL, while not as elegant as using the strongly typed LINQ, has the advantage of enabling dynamic queries, since you use a string to build a query, much like TSQL.

Both Linq to SQL and EDM allow inheritance and extending the code generated class with addtional partial classes. EF allows many to many relationships. I believe that LINQ to SQL will NOT be getting this by RTM.

These are just a few points and hardly exhaustive. But to me they are the low hanging fruit.

My latest asp.netPRO article is about ink-enabling web sites and is aimed at web developers who are new to the ink APIs for TabletPC development.

I LOVE the cover they did for this issue. Coooooool, huh?

Fabio Claudio Ferracchiati has a book on LINQ that he wrote against very early bits. When the March 2007 CTP came out, he blogged a list of things that he discovered had changed in LINQ syntax that required updates to his book. The list is handy if you have code even from the January CTP.