There are some new vista updates that deal with performance issues and in the list of what they fix I saw two things that had been annoying me. Read more...

[A New DevLife Post]

This is a big source of pride for many Vermonters.

It's amazing what goes into the process. The trees are selected many years in advance by local foresters and nurtured.

But there's more: fundraising, promotion, etc. THere is a whole website devoted to this cause: http://www.capitolchristmastree2007.org.

Vermont Teddy Bear is looking for a mid-level VB.NET programmer, who is comfortable with OO design principles, using the 2.0 framework and has some experience writing both Windows and Web applications.

Pluses would include writing SQL Stored Procedures, table design/normalization and using XML.

Please forward your resume to Jobs@VTBear.com

I have updated two of my demo Silverlight apps which broke with the RC version of Silverlight that came out last week.

The little embedded drawing surface at the top of this blog has been fixed along with my more full blown annoation application.

All of the changes I made were listed in the "What Changed Between Beta and RC" topic in the Help file that comes with the SDK. The one that had me confused for a while was switching the "\" to "/" in the xaml where I had images in subfolders etc. It confused me because I somehow skipped over it in the list and the error that it threw the error "2210: AG_E_INVALID_ARGUMENT" which didn't tell me too much.

You can read more about updating your Silverlight apps to work with the Release Candidate version here.
 

Social networking comes full circle. FrontPorchForum connects me to my very own neighbors and I am lovin' it! Read more here

[A New DevLife Post]

After many years of being an icon of teaching us all how to use Microsoft development tools, Mike Gunderloy decided he needed to transition himself away from a dependency on Microsoft for personal reasons stated in this blog post, the first of his alter-blog "A Fresh Cup".

It was a scary proposition, mostly because he has a family of 6 (including himself) to support.

It's been 7 months and in a recent "status report", Mike seems to be content with his progress, productive with his learning curve and getting work using his new tools.

I'm not sure if I could go through the refactoring that he has done, going from "expert" to starting over again with a new set of development tools. On the other hand, he brings an enormous amount of IP to his adventure which makes the transition that much more interesting.

I think if I were going to make a big life change like this, it would be more along the lines of doing a dramatic life-style downsizing and returning to my love of potting (as in making clay pots and sculptures) and that just ain't gonna happen any time soon.

I have an enormous amount of respect for Mike on many levels and his commitment to following (and following through on) what he believes in is pretty impressive.

While today was a perfect summer day and I not only got to go for a great bike ride, but I was introduced to a fantastic swimming hole, tomorrow is a day I've been looking forward to for a long time.

I am on a team of 20 women who are paddling a Dragonboat, along with 75 other teams, in the DragonFest.

I have never witnessed this event, but seen articles and videos and promised myself that I would go watch this year, but I was lucky enough to be invited to be on a boat filled with mostly women from my town.

You can learn all about the Dragon Boat Festival on this website.

I've written an article on the Jasper project that was just published on O'Reilly's WindowsDevCenter website.

Jasper is a new incubation project within the ADO.NET team at Microsoft, that leverages Entity Framework to allow developers to build websites dynamically. 

If you are just curious to learn more about what the heck Jasper is, why you should care about it or want to get your feet wet with the CTP, hopefully this will give you a good start.

Vermont Energy Investment Corp is looking for an Applications Programmer.

The Applications Programmer creates, modifies and maintains database driven applications for VEIC as a member of a software development team. 

Requirements: Two years experience or demonstrated proficiency writing the Microsoft.NET applications that use relational databases and undergraduate degree in computer science, computer information systems, or database design and development or a similar combination of education and experience from which comparable knowledge and skills are acquired.  C# and SQL Server experience preferred.

Respond with cover letter and resume to:
resume@veic.org
or mail to: VEIC Recruitment
255 South Champlain Street, Suite 7
Burlington, VT 05401
For more information: www.veic.org

Link to complete job description: http://www.veic.org/AboutUs/Jobs.cfm

Please note that the deadline for resume submission has been extended.

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]