Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Oh gawd - I was trying SO hard not to blink and overcompensated and have an odd look on my face. No matter how this looks, no, Jonathan Snook did NOT just pinch me!

From left to right

Jonathan Snook, me, Kelly Goto, Rob Howard, Bill Gates, Molly Holzschlag, Kip Kniskern, Jesse Warden, Keith Peters, Erik Natske.

Wednesday, December 05, 2007 2:16:41 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [6]  | 

I'm in Seattle and on my way home to Burlington. When I arrived at the airport, I saw that my flight was delayed but it didn't indicate for how long.

Shock of shocks ... there is snow in Chicago, so my flight through Chicago was potentially delayed. If it was delayed more than 1/2 hour, I would likely miss my connecton to get home - the last one of the night.

Normally, this would have made me unhappy. However, for the past two days, I had been trying to reroute my flight to Binghamton  or Syracuse NY so that I could attend a family funeral but it was going to cost $450 to make the change - with no option to use miles to pay for the difference. I had decided I would just fly home to Vermont, get up at 5am and drive the 5 hours to Syracuse.

But the delay ended up solving the problem for me. United was able to change my flight to go to Binghamton without any charge. This I can't complain about.

In the end, the Seattle to Chicago flight actually left on time, but I'm very happy that I'll be able to get to my parent's house tonight and we'll just work out the logistics of my getting back to Vermont later.

Wednesday, December 05, 2007 1:49:42 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

So I got back to my hotel room after the meeting and was getting a few things from my backpack and was sorely disappointed to find this:

A bottle of Maple Syrup I had brought with me from Vermont to give to Bill Gates. I had totally forgotten in the excitement of the whole day.

So, I very happily gave it to Tim Harris, from the DPE (Develper Platform Evangelism) team who had coordinated the trip and the day. He was already looking forward to the pancakes he plans to have tomorrow morning.

Wednesday, December 05, 2007 1:07:36 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [2]  | 
 Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Okay that was fun. I was the third one to ask a question and about one minute before my time there were suddenly about 5000 in my head.

Each person asked a question and each question started him off on an interesting road.

There will be a transcript provided so I'm not going to bother trying to share the entire conversation.

When we first sat down, I feared that my pulse was racing, but then it was easy to get absorbed in what he was talking about.

Interesting to me was his discussion of vision - that a lot of the driving force is based on the dream of what computing should be able to achieve someday.

For me, however, the most exciting thing is that with all of the money and power that Bill Gates wields, he continues to change the world through the Gates Foundation.

I managed to suggest that if he ever wanted to open a Gates Foundation office in Vermont, to give me a call...

We had a group photo that we'll get along with the transcript.

And no, we didn't get a zune - but I've got my Nano.

Tuesday, December 04, 2007 8:22:25 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

I asked Scott Guthrie if there will be any new technologies shown at MIX 08 that NOBODY has ever seen before and his answer was "Yes". Not just announcements of when something will RTM, but actual new capabilities... can't wait!

Tuesday, December 04, 2007 2:33:14 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

I was invited by the DPE team (Developer Platform Evanglism) along with 9 other people to attend the Mix n Mash 08 event where the MIX team is picking our brains while they formulate Mix08. Right now we are talking wiht Scott Guthrie about where Microsoft is headed with development tools.

Here is the list of people who are attending:

Kip Kniskern – www.liveside.net

Molly Holzschlag – www.molly.com

Jesse Warden – www.jessewarden.com

Jonathan Snook – www.snook.ca/jonathan

Keith Peters – www.bit-101.com

Kelly Goto – www.gotomobile.com

Erik Natzke – http://jot.eriknatzke.com

Julie Lerman – www.thedatafarm.com/blog

Rob Howard – http://weblogs.asp.net/rhoward

At the end of the day, we get to spend an hour with Bill Gates. I'm definitely excited about this. My husband has ben making a list of everything worng with his computer and his user experience for the past two months with the hope that I will present it to Bill. But, that's not going to happen.

Last year, attendees came clean with the admission that they had been given the gift of a Zune for attending. This year, as a joking nod to that, we got cookies that were decorated to look like a Zune. Photo later.

Discussions right now are focused on Microsoft in the mobile space. I also asked about the whole firehose problem - of SOOOO many technologies coming at us. The only way to deal with it of course is to ignore most of it and focus on what you are best at - but man that's is ONE hard bit of guidance to follow.

With my own focus on data access right now, it means that I'll be able to get you data but might not be able to help you get it on your form.

Tuesday, December 04, 2007 2:08:31 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [1]  | 
 Sunday, December 02, 2007

With the inclement weather all over the U.S. right now and a nasty forecast of snow & sleet for Burlington tomorrow morning, I've been watching the weather in Vermont, Chicago and Seattle as well as what's going on today with flights between those cities. I'm supposed to fly to Seattle tomorrow.

 

One great tool for watching flight patterns between airports is from the FAA's flight delay information - Air Traffic Control System Command Center website.

 

Another trick is just to go to United or whatever airline you prefer and ask it to show status for all flights between your destinations, rather than a specific flight #. SO I can see that flights between Burlington and Chicago today, some were cancelled, the 12:30pm flight left and arrived on time. The later afternoon flights are seriously delayed (eg 5pm flight delayed until 8pm). So it's all over the map. Tomorrow morning, my key piece of info will be when the flight FROM Chicago heads to Burlington because that plane turns around and flies back to Chicago which is the flight I'm supposed to be on. Snow & sleet also makes for interesting travel to drive to the airport, much less worrying about planes landing there. But pilots continue to amaze me when they make perfectly normal landings in conditions that have me white knuckled and with a racing pulse. I'll stick with the day job.

 

Sunday, December 02, 2007 3:34:17 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
 Saturday, December 01, 2007

Although these have been available to conference attendees, I have uploaded the presentations slides from the following sessions to the TALKS page of my website:

  • ADO.NET Entity Framework Overview
  • Real World Entity Framework (multi-tier issues and patterns)
  • ADO.NET 3.5 Data Access Guidance
  • Access RESTful DataServices in the Cloud (aka Astoria/ADO.NET DataServices)
  • Databinding in ASP.NET with LINQ
  • Inking in ASP.NET, AJAX and IE7
  • Annotating and Drawing with Ink in Silverlight

 

Saturday, December 01, 2007 10:16:17 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
 Friday, November 30, 2007

Thanks  (humongous thanks) to Chris Bowen for pulling off getting Vermont on the list for the installfest. It will be an "add-on" to the Roadshow day.

From his blog: (read the details carefully.. priority goes to registered attendees of the roadshow...)

Burlington (Williston), VT
December 6th, 4:15 to 6:00 PM
Vermont Technical College, 201 Lawrence Place, Room 401, Williston, VT
In partnership with the Vermont .NET User Group

Like Rochester, we're running this InstallFest in the same room as the Roadshow event that day.  Stay with us from 4:15 until 6:00 and enjoy some food, camaraderie, and gaming.

Priority for giveaways will be given to everyone who attends (not just registers for) the Burlington Roadshow event.  Remaining materials are available, while they last, to any walk-ins.

 

Partnering with area user groups, we're offering attendees a chance to install the release version Visual Studio 2008, enjoy some food, conversation, and gaming!  Since the packaged product hasn't been released yet, here's what will happen:

  • Bring your laptops (or heck, a desktop!) and your festive selves
  • Grab a DVD with the Visual Studio 2008 Pro Trial Edition bits
  • Install and be happy
  • Play some Halo 3 or Guitar Hero, munch on some food, chat with people
  • Go home and enjoy VS2008
  • ...wait...
  • When the packaged product ships, you'll get a copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional in the mail!  (Which will *not* require a reinstall of the trial version.)

zune-8gb-thumb As an added incentive to get VS2008 installed that evening, we're giving away T-shirts and raffling off a new 8GB Zune among the people who get VS2008 on their machines!

"Free Sounds Good!  So, Where?  When?  How Do I Sign Up?"

You may notice that the events are generally on our MSDN Roadshow days (except for Waltham, where the Roadshow will be the following day.)  That's of course no coincidence, we'd like to take advantage of our passing through various areas in the northeast to run these special events. 

Each event has its own timing, registration, and logistics, detailed below.

As you can guess, we have limited quantities of giveaways (and "free" always draws a crowd) so we can't guarantee everyone will walk away with something.

 

Friday, November 30, 2007 1:56:16 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
 Thursday, November 29, 2007

I attended Zlatko Michailov's talk on Entity SQL today at DevTeach which was definitely interesting to me. In showing Entity SQL queries, Zlatko used a tool that he built as an experiment that evaluates Entity SQL queries (with some intellisense help as you type them!), displays the resulting provider level SQL and then displays the resulting data in grids (plural if there is related data in the result). It will be cool to see that tool evolve into something that we can use...keep your eyes on his blog just in case!

While I learned a ton, one of the very interesting (amazing actually) things that Zlatko shared with us about the upcoming Beta 3 of Entity Framework is that they had done some serious work on performance in the Object Services layer and that it is almost as fast in materializing objects as the Entity Client is at streaming results. He also said that they are closing in on SQLClient performance.

Thursday, November 29, 2007 1:32:09 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

I learned today about Diego Vega who is another new hire on the Entity Framework team. Diego is responsible for Linq to Entities. As EF grows, there are more and more specialized people on the team. So now we have Zlatko who is the Entity SQL PM, Alex who owns the Entity Data Model and Diego will be focused on LINQ to Entities.

A funny post yesterday as Diego gets "revenge" on Zlatko who wrote a post on LINQ to Entities. Diego's revenge is to write a post about Entity SQL. And of course, we're the beneficiaries!

Thursday, November 29, 2007 1:26:50 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
 Wednesday, November 28, 2007

I find that people really want to tell me what's wrong with Entity Framework. This is a good thing. It's how I learn. It's sometimes a little overwhelming, but since I feel like I'm just the messenger, I don't take any of it personally.

So go ahead.

Tell me why you don't like Entity Framework. Why you think people should stay away from it (I heard this advice was being given in a SQL Connections talk). Why you want to hit someone. Why it frightens you. Why you think it is a dba's nightmare. Bring it on.

But only do so with the understanding that I ask only because it will help me understand Entity Framework better. 

Wednesday, November 28, 2007 4:48:57 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [2]  | 
Wednesday, November 28, 2007 1:22:53 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
 Tuesday, November 27, 2007

The Data Programmability team has an extensive post about current issues with connecting to SQL Server 2008 at design time and runtime via .NET 2.0.

If you are using the beta of SQL Server 2008, I recommend checking the blog post!

Tuesday, November 27, 2007 5:59:25 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
 Sunday, November 25, 2007

Over on CIO.com where CIOs go to get help with technology direction decisions for their companies, Esther Schindler takes a look at the Programming Language Popularity (non scientific) study which analyzed search terms for Yahoo and craigslist, book titles on Amazon.com, languages used in Freshmeat projects and more.

Language choice is a much different decision for CIOs than it is for developers, Esther says.

While she finds the results

"interesting—well, okay, they're fascinating if you're a software development and statistics geek like me, and for your sake I hope you aren't."

But she's not keen on their methodology ....  you can read her post here.

Sunday, November 25, 2007 7:55:20 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

*Update* It turns out that I completely misunderstood Zlatko Michailov's email reply to me when I was having trouble with this. I seem to have freaked out the team by writing this errant blog post. Sorry guys.

When using ObjectQuery, I was doing this:

Dim myAWEntities=New AdventureWorksEntities

dim myObjQuery=myAWEntities.CreateQuery(Of Customer)("SELECT VALUE cust from myAWEntities.Customer as cust ")

I was thinking in LINQ, using the variable of the instance I had created.

But if I use the entitySet name, it's fine.

"SELECT VALUE cust from AWEntities.Customer as cust " &

I am having a really hard time believing that I didn't try that since I was trying a lot of things, but it is now working and I'm still on Beta2.

I went around in circles with this one a few weeks ago (preparing for a session at DevConnections) and saw that someone had the same problem on the forums yesterday so thought I would blog it.

I have no idea if it will change going forward, but this is in E.F. Beta 2.

Entity SQL is the query language that you use when

1. querying through ObjectServices directly by creating an ObjectQuery as in

Dim MyObjQuery=MyObjectContext.CreateQuery(Of MyEntityClassType)(myEntitySQLQueryString).

or 2. querying through the Provider: EntityClient

Dim myCommand=New EntityCommand(myEntitySqlQueryString,myEntityConnection)
Dim myDataReader=myCommand.ExecuteReader(COmmandBehavior.SequentialAccess)

A simplistic EntitySQL query looks something like this:

"Select cust from Customer as cust" where Customer is referring to an EntityClass in my model.

The difference between using this with ObjectServices vs. EntityCLient is that in ObjectServices, you will have already identified the namespace that the CustomerClass lives in when you create the ObjectContext.

FOr example,

Dim myAWEntities=New AdventureWorksEntities

So when you create the ObjectQuery, it actually barfs, I mean throws an exception, if you tell it the namespace again. So you just want plain old Customers.

If my query read "Select cust from AdventureWorksEntities.Customer as cust"

The exception would be

Failed to resolve AdventureWorksEntities.Customer' in the current scope or context. Make sure referenced variables are in scope, required schemas are loaded and namespaces referenced correctly, near multipart identifier, line xxx, number xxx.

Now with EntityClient, there is no indication outside of the query string as to the namespace, so you NEED to tell it the namespace.

Unfortunately, it's not obvious because if you look at examples out on the web you'll see it both ways and it might take a while (as it did in my case) for the subtle difference to become clear.

Sunday, November 25, 2007 11:35:50 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [1]  | 
 Saturday, November 24, 2007

I sometimes feel like Gretel picking up tidbits on my way to the Gingerbread house when it comes to getting clues about what's coming in Beta3 of Entity Framework.

The next two I have found are:

From Alex James blog, Entity Framework is getting compiled queries similar to what's in LINQ to SQL. You can pre-compile query expressions, save them and even pass them around.

One thing that Alex mentions is that they are not tied to the ObjectContext (which is how you can pass them around) and therefore it must be the magic behind the next tidbit - which is that we'll be able to get at the TSQL generated from the query expressions more easily.as per Danny Simmons in this forum thread.

It is currently possible to see the TSQL in a convoluded way of digging into the EntityCommand that is explained in the answer to this forum post. WHen I saw that, I tried to write a debugger visualizer but discovered that because the EntityCommand is not serializable (nor the objectQuery, from which you can grab the EntityCOmmand) there was no way to get the commandtree over to a separate process where the debugger is hosted. Someone actually got around it with an enormous number of lines of code (see this forum thread) but I decided that I would just bide my time for a simpler way to appear in the bits.

We'll see in a few weeks what it looks like. 

Saturday, November 24, 2007 11:25:53 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
 Friday, November 23, 2007

My parents have sent me another batch of photos (puppies at day 2) for their website. This one is especially gorgeous.

Friday, November 23, 2007 10:05:07 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [1]  | 

This will be DevTeach's first non-Montreal based conference. I've never been to Vancouver and am looking forward to seeing it.

As always prior to a multi-day trip, I have a little trepidation.

We're just getting beautiful snow and I want to ski. My parents (who live 5 hours away in the Binghamton NY area) just had a litter of 17 puppies and could sure use my help. And as always, it's hard to leave Tasha and Daisy who's days are quite numbered.

I also believe this is the first conference I've attended where summer clothes won't suffice. I hate having to pack a bag that I can't carry on, but it might make my life a little easier. But it's not cold enough for snow at least so I don't have to bring *that* much.

Here's the DevTeach website....www.devteach.com

Friday, November 23, 2007 1:06:48 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

Possibly a record... my parents Newfoundland, Elsa, had 17 puppies on Thanskgiving day. My folks are breeders. They actually have 2 more littlers coming which when all added up could double this number. The pictures of the babies are already on their website . They are cute as cute can be. Newfie puppies weigh about 1 lb each when born and then they just grow and grow and grow!

Blue Heaven Newfoundlands

A little family tree:

The puppies' mother is Elsa and father is Solomon.

Elsa's father is Theo. Solomon's mother is Theo's sister, Celeste. (So they are cousins, not siblings...this is not scary in the dog world, like it would be in the human world!)

Theo and Celeste came from France, but their mother, Rudy, was a puppy bred by my parents and her father is Packard.

And Packard is the son of my Daisy!

So these puppies are Daisy's great, great, great grand-puppies! :-)

Daisy, by the way, will be 13 years old in January. But Tasha's not impressed, as she will be 14 in two weeks. 13 and 14 are both amazing ages for newfies.

Friday, November 23, 2007 12:12:06 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [1]  |