I opened up the Amazon.com site today and was quite startled to see this:

But when I viewed the source, I saw that rather than just one DIV that embedded all of this functionality (which is what I would expect from a Silverlight object) , there was a ton of html and script pulling this off, including a reference to:

 new SWFObject("http://g-ec2.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/s9-ampaigns/MultiPackCarousel._V19505961_.swf

SWF spells Flash. Oh well.

Finally, I get to share Entity Framework with my own user group (in Burlington, VT)! Yay.

When: Monday, July 9th, 6-8:30pm

Where: Champlain College, Hauke Building Room 005 (375 Maple Street, Burlington, VT)

More info at www.vtdotnet.org

Of course, I'm spending all of my time futzing with the new bits that just got released earlier this week.

Not only do I have a cool technology to show off but we've got awesome raffles from Infragistics (a license to NetAdvantage) and from Code Zone (a fingerprint reader, Vista Ultimate license, a book from MSPress (Visual C# 2005: The Language) and some more of the fun GEEK mugs.

rspv@vtodtnet.org for pizza ($5 for pizza & soda - no sponsor this month).

Thanks to the Software Engineering Department at Champlain College for sponsoring the cost of the room all summer.

By default, when querying entities, you need to explicitly use the Load method to get related data. This is often called "lazy loading" and ensure you only get what you ask for rather than having a query return ALL related data automatically. The new SPAN method forces an entity to include specifid children during a query so that you don't have to load after the fact. READ MORE

[A New DevLife Post]

Danny Simmons has a great list of changes to Entity Framework that have finally arrived in the latest CTP. These improvements are not insignificant and the list is filled with functionality that many of us have been really looking forward to. I' feel a little harnessed having to use VWD Express right now and haven't touched all of these things. But I was happy to see Views & Sprocs listed in the wizard and NOT to have the damn code gen message telling me that associations can't be created for a key that is both a foreign key and a primary key. That means Orders will be able to find their details again!

The default constructors are gone in the code gen class but it's hard to see since the code generated class is not exposed in the web site. I was able to find the compiler code version deep down inside of

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\website2\5618daca\5d6fd1a4\Sources_App_Code\model.csdl.[guid-type number].cs.

That's just the toplevel stuff. I'm looking forward to digging down a little deeper to play with SPAN and well, just about everything on Danny's list.

Note that the installation instructions for the June CTP of VWD (which the June CTP of Entity Framework installs on top of) have changed. See the ADO.NET Team blog for the updated version of the post.

This is my current internet speed:

yet while trying to install the June CTP of VWD Express on a Virtual PC (that has WIndows XP on it and needs .NET 3.5 as part of the install) my 3.38Mbps dowload speed is a bit slower - avg 3KB to 7KB (if I have all of my 0's in place, I think this is 500 to 1000 times slower). At 3.38Mbps, the 426MB file should take about 20 minutes. This is more like 20 days. Uggh.

Pragmatic Technologies in Burlington is looking to fill another developer position. "While we don't limit our search to .NET developers the ideal candidate will have experience with .NET, particularly ASP.NET."

Here is our posting: http://www.jobsinvt.com/seek/resultdetail.aspx?JOBNUM=211553

The ADONET Team today announced that the June CTP of Entity Framework is available. It is currently only available packaged with the June CTP of Visual Web Developer Express. Being a CTP release, they have just done enough to get something in our hands so we can see what they are working on.

A lot of what is in here is what I saw Brian Dawson using at DevConnections in March.

The ADONET team blog post lists the changes to look for and makes some important notes about the installation.

I'm off to download!

Last time I wanted to play with using videos as a source for Silverlight media, I found that Silverlight's "WMV only, thank you" limitation put the kibosh on my plans. YouTube and Yahoo are Flash and at the time Soapbox was password protected. Soapbox's latest beta removed the permissions requirement on June 1 so I finally found some time today to go digging around to see if I could now use those videos as a source for dynamic embedding in silverlight. I was a little bummed to see that the the videos are also flash. Here's what you get when you request embed script for a particular video:

<embed src="http://images.soapbox.msn.com/flash/soapbox1_1.swf" quality="high" width="432" height="364" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" flashvars="c=v&v=30dd604f-e0f6-498e-a24c-e3b65c7d2452" ><embed><br /><a href="http://soapbox.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=30dd604f-e0f6-498e-a24c-e3b65c7d2452" target="_new" title="Microsoft® Silverlight">Video: Microsoft® Silverlight</a>

Flash flash flash

I tried pasting in the url anyway for the videos just in case, but of course, it doesn't work.

bah!

Soapbox is still a beta, and does have great features, so hopefully (presumably?) there will be more options in the future.

My first MVP award was on July 1, 2003. I received an email this morning that I have been awarded an MVP (Developer Visual Basic) again. This is my 5th. I am always a little surprised since I never really know year to year what the criteria is. I just do what I do and if that makes Microsoft happy, I find out on July 1st.

I was smart this year to spend every last dollar of the past year's Microsoft bucks before the end of June. When I was down to $5, I found these cute little "beanie baby" type MSN butterflies for $2.50 each. They will be a fun thing to give to someone's kid. Not bad for a non-shopper like myself. My nephews got some pc games and Office 2007 Home & Student edition. I was able to get copies of Office for my sister as she expands her business. It's nice that I can share this benefit with my family, whom I steal time to go to conferences, run my user group, etc. Before the airlines got more strict with their carry-on rules, my husband's benefit was that I brought home a 6-pack of local brew in my backpack when I did INETA speaker trips to user groups around the country.

Loren is a long time TabletPC guru and developer. He has also been very involved with teh UMPCs. So it was only natural that he wanted to check out an iPhone. He blogged while he stood in line and has written his first impressions, from testing out the touch screen in a bouncy car, how it looks in the sunlight, how the touchscreen works in general,  to wishing there was an open SDK that he could develop against.

Michele Leroux Bustamante will be doing a 15 (fifteen!!) part web cast series on Windows Communication Foundation starting this month.

Michele is a web services guru who has written Learning WCF and knows this stuff inside and out!

As a follow up to my recent post about spending time with the teens attending the Summer Institute in Information Technology in Burlington, I've written about my visit over on my DevLife blog.

[A New DevLife Post]

I saw this in my Microsoft downloads email yesterday:

Access 2007 Download: Access Developer Extensions

Access 2007 Developer Extensions make it easy to deploy and manage solutions built using Access.

Packing and sharing Access solutions has always been a pain in the rear. My recollection (it's been a while) was that there was no freely available runtime. So every end user had to have a full license to Access, even if they weren't doing any development.

So now the runtime will be free. It's not quite available yet but will be out soon.

Here's more from the Office Developer Center:

As Philip Elmer-Dewitt says on Business 2.0's website: "it may be the most impressive demonstration to date of Apple CEO Steve Jobs' legendary mastery of the art of media manipulation."

The hype has definitely works on me and this has a historical basis. I was stuck in an airport lounge late one night just when the Nano was released. I must have seen the same Nano ad 30 times that night and a few days later, I bought one (my very first iPod ever). But  for the iPhone I have a few things to protect me making the same mindless grab: 1) no iPhone's in Vermont (no AT&T) and 2) in the long run, I think I'm too cheap.

I have a simple phone and if/when I get another, it would be to get access to my email and also share my calendar from outlook. I don't download music or need to carry around my dogs pictures. My iPod (nano) mostly has podcasts (ala Wait Wait Don't Tell me, Fresh Air, DotNetRocks) on it and some old Bonnie Raitt, etc. albums. When I see the iPhone ad, I GOTTA HAVE IT, but then a minute later reality seeps back in and I remember I don't have much need for it.

There are plenty of people that will tell you the more technical reasons why you might not want in iPhone (yet) such as issues with the EDGE network if you are interested in it's web capabilities. Others worry about the fact that you can't replace the battery if you need to, can't expand memory, can't add SIMS, etc.

I bet that all of those people who lined up at the Apple stores around the country yesterday don't care. All that matters to many is that it's COOL and it's SHINY and it's made by Apple. 

Last year, there was lots of buzz about a possible iTablet, for example, ZDNet's Matthew Miller is piecing together some various things he'd been reading. I never really paid much attention to it but now the iPhone has been making me wonder  if the technology that has gone into the iPhone is headed for other things (and if I was paying more attention , that's probably been said in a thousand blogs, too). Certainly if you google "tablet pc" and apple there's gobs of speculation - mostly from last year because a patent had been filed at some point. The patent most likely was for the technology in the iPhone. But heck, I have a touch screen tablet pc (Lenovo Thinkpad X60) and yet I'm still drooling over the iPhone (no AT&T in Vermont and I want Mobile 6 anyway and someone also pointed out on a listserv today... that phone's now cost more than computers!).

I don't know how Apple would ever come close to what Microsoft has done with the Tablet PC platform though, especially with the hand writing recognition. If I recall correctly, there were over a million samples used to get the recognition algorithms. On my touch screen, I can actually write with my finger (just for fun, and it was Stephen Toub who gave me that idea) and the reco works with that even!

Of course there's always Surface which is just as droolyas an iPhone  - just can't put it in your pocket.

I've been using Mike Volodarsky's patch for a while for sites that I am developing in IIS7 (no problems with file based development server) to get past debugger auto-attach problems. Now an official hotfix has been released.

Read more here

[A New DevLife Post]

I'm really excited about joining a group of about 50 high school students tomorrow who are participating in the Summer Institute in Information Technology at Champlain College this week. This is part of the Governor’s Institute of Vermont program.

According to Ann DeMarle (Director of the college's Emergent Media Center (among other impressive titles)) who is running the program, the kids range from very creative types doing digital video to hard-core programmers. About 1/3 of the students are girls.

I'm going to go talk to them a bit about having a career as a geek (and doing this in Vermont, of all places ) and then hang out with them while they work on their projects. Susan Wisowaty is going to join me as well. So between Ann, Susan and me, women with technical careers in I.T. will be well represented!

I will definitely follow up with a post on this after the fact.

It was cool on Saturday so Rich & I decided to go for a hike on the Long Trail. We drove to the top of the App Gap (which is near our home) and hiked south on the LT. This crosses over the top of the Mad River Glen trails, so we had lunch at the top of the double chair, looking out over the White Mountains in New Hampsire and then went on to to top of the Single Chair. There was some stuff that was pretty daunting to me in between those two spots, so rather than turn around and do them going back down, we hiked back down the ski trails and cut over to the road. Here are some pictures I took along the way.

There was a lot of Trillium  (will look through my wildflower books this weekend to try to see what the heck these are! They looked like a cross between a trillium family and wild orchid family to me..) along the way which was suprising to see in late June.

While at TechEd, David Sceppa wrote about the status of various database vendors as they create proviers for LINQ and Entity Framework. read more

[A new DevLife post]