Well, I didn't pay attention and all of my silverlight apps are broken. But fixing them up was pretty easy (except for one lingering issue I'm having with CreateFromXaml and ink presenter stroke data). Here's a post to point you to what you need to updates your apps from Beta to RC and also a great resource for Silverlight Error Codes.

[A New DevLife Post]

Some of the best Entity Framework info is currently living in the MSDN forums.

Mike Pizzo is the Principal Architect on the DP (Data Programmability) team.

Today, Mike wrote a lengthy response to yet another query on "what is the difference between linq to sql and Entity Framework". At DevConnections in March, I asked 5 different people from Microsoft this question and got 5 different answers.  A few weeks later, I wrote my own answer in this blog post. The DP team has become much clearer about thsi lately.

Here are some highlights from Mike's reply:

• LINQ to SQL is targeted more toward rapidly developing applications against your existing Microsoft SQL Server schema, while the Entity Framework provides object- and storage-layer access to Microsoft SQL Server and 3^rd party databases through a loosely coupled, flexible mapping to existing relational schema.
• LINQ to SQL has features targeting "Rapid Development" against a Microsoft SQL Server database.
• The Entity Framework has features targeting "Enterprise Scenarios". 
• The Entity Framework is more than LINQ to Entities; it includes a "storage layer" that lets you use the same conceptual application model through low-level ADO.NET Data Provider interfaces using Entity SQL, and efficiently stream results as possibly hierarchical/polymorphic DataReaders, saving the overhead of materializing objects for read-only scenarios where there is no additional business logic. 

You can read the entire reply here.

IBM is definitely the largest employer in Vermont. I think when I moved here in 1999 they had something like 8000 or 9000 employees.

This news just appeared on the Burlington Free Press website:

IBM announced job cuts today at its Essex Junction facility. A total of 90 workers were notified starting this morning that their jobs will end.

The action is part of 450 job cuts, most of them at IBM’s East Fishkill, N.Y. and Poughkeepsie, N.Y., facilities.

IBM employs 5,700 at Essex Junction. The cuts are related to a reorganization of manufacturing and development within the Systems and Technology Group, which includes Essex Junction, said Glen Thomas, company spokesman at IBM’s offices in Somers, N.Y.

Read the entire article here...

In the same MSDN forum thread that I referred to in my post "Beta2 - Where's Entity Framework?", Danny Simmons says (with my emphasis)

Believe me, if there were some way to release it sooner with the level of quality that is needed and including the first CTP of the designer which we have promised will be part of this release, then we most certainly would.

I must have missed the promise in past posts/discussions and had no idea that we were going to get our hands back on the Visual Modeler this soon. While I'm also disappointed not to have the new Entity Framework bits to play with yet, this is really great news!

I solved a new showstopper login problem and finally figured out how to get alerts delivered by email! Read more...

[A New DevLife Post]

Dinesh Kulkarni, a PM on the LINQ team, has a nice list of what to look for in LINQ to SQL in the new beta. Read more...

 [A New DevLife Post]

Since this spring, the Data Programmability team has been clear that Entity Framework is going to be developed along side of VS2008, but won't be part of the VS2008 install and that Entity Framework will be released after Visual Studio 2008 releases (during the 1st half of 2008 is the narrowest timeframe we've been told so far).

In this April 28th post, Mike Pizzo states:

We will continue to ship CTPs and Betas of the ADO.NET Entity Framework that align with Orcas throughout the remainder of this year.

At the beginning of this month we saw how this works. There was a June CTP of VS2008 and a separate CTP of Entity Framework that had to be installed on top of Visual Studio CTP.

I also know that the Beta2 of Entity Framework will be vastly improved over what we saw in the June CTP, so I am very eager to get my hands on it.

So why is it that when I downloaded Beta2 yesterday and opened it up, I still had this hope, this expectation that Entity Framework would be in there? Why was I so disappointed that it wasn't? Foolish girl.

Since for some reason, I wasn't able to log into the forums on my computer, when I finally tried it on a different computer (after two days of being "stuck"), I saw that Danny Simmons clarifies the timing:

Since the Entity Framework is now shipping separately from Orcas, the Orcas beta 2 does not include any Entity Framework bits, and unfortunately the existing CTP will also not work with beta 2.  We will, however, have a beta version of the entity framework sometime in August that will work with beta 2 (and have some additional goodies <grin>).

So I'll have to just keep a stiff upper lip and entertain myself with some of the many other new toys in VS2008, fiddle with Astoria or maybe even just do some of my client work!

VS2008 Beta2 has been released. Read all about it here on Scott Guthrie's blog. Pay special attention to the special installation instructions. And if you could give me another few hours to get it downloaded before you hop on the bandwagon (or bandwidth as that may be), that would be oh so kind of you.

This is the biggest milestone towards the release. COngrats to all who have been working so hard on this.

I've always been a little confused about where Data Access fits into the bigger picture of organizational structure. Even when I speak at conferences, nobody knows where to put data access talks. Smart Client? Web Development? Architecture? Database? It covers all of these areas. At DevConnections, the Microsoft talks about the Entity Framework were in the SQL Server track. So basically developers weren't aware of the talks because the SQL Server schedule was on a different chart than the schedule for ASP Connections and VS Connections.

This is happily fixed for November since we have our very own Data Access track!! I'll write more about that another time, but you can find the talks listed in both the ASP show and the VS show.

I also never was really clear on where the ADO.NET Team fit into Microsoft. I know they are in the same building as the SQL Server team. But I always think of ADO.NET being more closely tied with Visual Studio since that's where I do my data access coding.

In this introductory post for the Astoria Team, Mike Flasko clarifies the relationship, even though he just did so in passing. He refers to the Astoria team as:

part of the “Data Programmability” (DP) team within the SQL Server organization at Microsoft

... "within" ...

So, SQL Server owns data access. Interesting. I never really realized that. But it makes sense.

I have always referred to anyone working in data access as the ADO.NET team. That's wrong. There is a team that is specifically for ADO.NET, but that is within DP. So DP encompasses ADO.NET and Astoria. What else? Digging back to the initial post in the Data Programmability blog (blogs.msdn.com/data), Sam Drucker describes the umbrella of the DP team. Note that this was before Astoria and Jasper so they go under there as well, though Jasper is still an incubator project, not a product.

Sam said (back in June 2006). The highlights are my own so I can count the list.

We have a lot of technologies under our umbrella and no matter what part of the Windows platform you use we’ve got you covered. The team has been building solutions for data programmability for many years, from the early formation of ODBC, the advances of OLEDB, core XML processing support with MSXML, ADO with Visual Basic, TDS and SOAP access to SQL Server, JDBC connectivity, working with Visual Studio on XML editing, XSLT debugging, and of course the new wave of productivity with the .NET Framework with ADO.NET and System.Xml. We also have been a big part of the WinFS project. The main way to get all the details is to visit our MSDN sites: msdn.com/data and msdn.com/xml.

ADO.NET and XML are siblings!

Hey, this is starting to look like the beginnings of one of Roger Jennings' historical analyses!

That's right. The first CTP of the next version of Visual Studio Team System will be released right on the heels of VS2008 Beta2. Read more...

[A New DevLife Post]

Astoria, the data service project (think web services that expose data) based on Entity Framework, which was introduced at MIX07, has moved from the incubator to being a full fledged product with a team and a blog. READ MORE.

[A New DevLife Post]

verb: to manually aggregate selected blog posts

I actually used this in a sentence the other day. Egad!

In my peripheral vision yesterday, I noticed something trotting by my office window. Looking up I discovered that those long legs belonged to a deer. Then along came her babies. I was able to click this through the screen before they ran off. I immediately went out to my veggie garden (the direction they had come from) to make sure they hadn't just had a little feast! All was in tact, though I wouldn't have minded if they had eaten the mustard greens which have bolted and are even more bitter than normal.

Astoria, one of the two data access projects announced at MIX07 now has it's own Program Manager, Mike Flasko, and it's own blog. Astoria is something to pay attention to.

And congrats to Mike on his very recent wedding bells! He's a lucky guy!

Unfortunately, we'll have to reschedule Rob Daigneau's Aug. 13th presentation on WCF. We're both bummed, but we'll get him back in the fall, for sure!

However, we lucked out because we were able to get Richard Hale Shaw to "fill in". Richard is one of the top instructors in the country and lives in Boston, so he is going to come up to present to Vermont.NET for our August meeting.

As if that wasn't enough, telerik has generously offered to sponsor this meeting. They will be covering Richard's T&E as well as our pizza. Rumor has it that there is a big pile of telerik's famously fun t-shirts on their way to Vermont as well along with software licenses!

Thanks to telerik, to Richard and also to Rob (who *really* wants to come, it just didn't work out this month)!

Definitely get August 13th on your calendar.

Stay tuned to the VTdotNET website for more details as we waiting on a topic from Richard.

Funny that my last post was a week ago as I was on my way to Michigan. Perhaps the fact that I have been silent for a whole week is testimony to the fact that I was having too much fun to sit down and blog about it!

Both user groups got "the same" presentation: Overview of ADO.NET Entity Framework, but as Jeff McWherter, (who attended both talks and did a lot of driving to do so!) notes, it was very different from one night to the next.

The first night was at the Microsoft office in Southfield, outside of Detroit, at the GANG user group. This one wasn't an INETA sponsored event, but as long as I was so close for the next night's meeting, I just came in a day early to do it. There were a whole bunch of fun and friendly folks there and I got asked a lot of great questions. It was also great to see some familiar faces such as Patrick Steele and Josh Holmes (who was on the INETA speaker bureau until he swallowed the red pill and became a D.E.).

The next night I spoke at GLUG in Lansing Michigan. But first I was treated to some local flavor thanks to u.g. leader Joe Kunk who was a great tour guide. Lansing is the capital of Michigan and Joe works for the House and was able to give me a great tour of the incredible and recently renovated state capital building. THen I was treated to lunch at a classic lunch spot called "Kewpees" where I experienced their famous Olive Burger. It took a little encouragement from Joe before I ordered it, but it was pretty good! I found the website with the Kewpee history where I learned that Kewpees was a chain but there are only a few left. One was actually in Utica, NY, about an hour from where I grew up.

After lunch I got to go visit the always fun Betsy Weber at TechSmith. I was surprised that when I was on the phone with her in their parking lot and asked "which building are you in?" she said "all of them". That's four buildings though they are building a new (green, LEED Certified... yay) building so they can all be together again. It's a big and growing company! Betsy introduced me to the president, Bill "We will not share your e-mail address with anyone else, period" Hamilton and (man, I really need to learn to edit when I talk) somehow my past job history at Playboy and Penthouse came up. Luckily, he is a funny laid back guy (which is probably why the whole company seems to have a cool and relaxed atmosphere) so I hopefully didn't shock him too much (though I think I did try just a little. ) Not only did I get to see what's coming in Camtasia (key to me is that many existing features will be much simpler to discover and use), but I also got a tour of the cool Jing project that had just been released 2 days prior and already had over 11,000 downloads.

Next on my tour was a tour of Michigan State and I can tell you that the locals are PROUD of this university!

The meeting was held on campus and I was surprised that there were almost 50 people there. Unfortunately I had a strange problem with my VPC which was finally solved with a total reboot of my computer (which takes some time to get everything up and running again) but thankfully I was able to do what I came to do. While I was futzing with my computer, the group was introduced to two reps from webhost Verio (located in Florida) who had come up from Florida to meet the group as they were the first to sign up for free hosting for INETA user group members. I was pretty impressed that they came up for this reason!

After the meeting I had a blast at Bennigans with a bunch of folks from the group and the Verio guys then it was off to Ann Arbor for a mini-vacation and the art fair.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this really great trip!

I will post my revised Powerpoint and demos shortly and will write a quick blog post with links to them.

I'll be in the Detroit area this week giving presentations on the ADO.NET ENtity Framework at GANG in Southfield (Wednesday night) and GLUG in Lansing (Thursday night). THe Lansing talk is sponsored by INETA. Read more here...

[A New DevLife Post]

From the VTRails user group:

Meeting - July 25th at 6:00pm - Pub and Brewery in Burlington Downtown

We picked Pub and Brewery for the meeting, for it’s friendly atmosphere, location and good tasting beer. The plan is to meet everybody in person and shake hands and see what topics are attracting most of the interest.

We are going to raffle Rails Cookbook we received from O’Reilly.

See everybody there!

USA Today held a contest between towns named Springfield all over the country to host the premiere of the Simpsons movie. Springfield, Vermont had not been included and brought it to the attention of the organizers so they got on the list. Springfield, VT, like the state, is a small town with a population of only 9000 and a movie theater with only 100 seats. The other 13 towns were much larger... some are cities.

But tiny Springfield, VT actually won the contest with the most votes -- over 15,000. There have been a lot of complaints, mostly among the 21,000 comments to the above USA Today online article. Even an Oregon congressman got in on it although apparently he was just joking around.  Springfield, OR was one of the entrants and most likely the true inspiration for the Simpson's town.

So how did Springfield win with so many more votes than their population?

Even though I have only lived in Vermont for 8 years and will never be considered a true Vermonter (5+ generations required ), I can tell you why.

In many ways, Vermont is one big home town. Phish is the "local band" to many. Ben & Jerry's is "our ice cream" and there are Vermonters who are known to carry a small supply of the "only true" Maple Syrup with them when they travel. Most people who live in Vermont take pride in anything that hails from anywhere in our state. Obviously this doesn't apply to everything. You'll find lots of people who are dead-set against Civil Unions, Howard Dean and many other things deemed as the evils of the flatlander infiltration.

But on a different level, this "state spirit" really exists. It was quickly apparent to me after I moved from New York to Vermont. In New York state, it was hard enough to keep up with the entire county that you lived in, much less what was going on elsewhere in the state. 

And while I have never been to Springfield VT and had to look on a map to see where it was, I eagerly voted for it because I was voting for Vermont.

That is likely how Springfield got over 15,000 votes. The local daily newspaper in Burlington (Vermont's biggest city and over 100 miles away) treated this as front page news. The t.v. stations all had stories about it. So people all over Vermont became aware of the competition and many, like me, were proud to put their vote behind our little town. Vermont's entire population is somewhere around 600,00. Springfield, IL came in second with a little under 15,000 votes. If the same 2.5% of the state of Illinois had voted for their Springfield, they would have had 325,000 votes. If 100% of the residents of Springfield, IL had voted, that would have been over 100,000 votes.

So I am confident that it was state pride that won Springfield, VT this big spotlight of hosting the premiere. I have no idea how they will handle the potential number of people coming into the town  for the event. This is probably why they weren't in the original list. But that will be another story and it will be headline news all over Vermont for days and days.

I don't have a Mac, but while I was working on my Silverlight annotation tests, I had a few friends try them out on Safari on their Macs and they reported that it just didn't work at all.

Now that we have a Windows version, I finally did a few tests myself.

At first, I was being prompted to install (the already installed) Silverlight.

This post by Jeremy Boyd helped me elimitate that problem. When the page first appeared the spot where my embedded Silverlight goo should be was all white. But I saw in this post by Tim Heuer (Tim suggests another solution for the seemingly uninstalled Silverlight, but that one didn't work for me), that resizing the browser helped and indeed, it did. I was surprised to actually see my solution appear!

Then I started clicking on the images on the right. Nothing happened. But when I inadvertently resized the browser again, the images did appear.

I was actually able to do a little drawing on the screen (not the one above!) but it wasn't much fun. Draw a stroke. Resize. See the stroke I just drew. Etc.

So it's close, but not there yet. I don't think there's much I can do but wait for some change to this  beta version of Silverlight or some change to this beta version of Safari for Windows.