We just got a call from my mom on her way home from the vet with the last of the three litters! Bumper had eleven puppies. We can't wait to see them.

You can keep an eye on things at my parent's website: Blue Heaven Kennels.

Here's a picture of the mommy, Bumper, at a dog show.

It's feeding time again! These are Celeste's 6 puppies.

(On going... you can catch up at www.blueheavennewfoundlands.com)

The second litter was born yesterday. I'm helping to watch over them today. Celeste has to feed them every two hours and they nurse for over 1/2 hour. In between everyone rests up and the puppies get a Snuggle Puppy to curl up with. These are more than toys as they have a heartbeat and are warm. Sometimes they are all underneath it. Here's what they are doing right now (there are 6 total but you can't see them all here). The upstairs puppies (the litter of 17 that is now two weeks old) get two Snuggle puppies!

At the recent Mix n Mash 08, Bill Gates talked about how Microsoft creates their vision for software and computing and the acts upon that vision. Read more...

[A New DevLife Post]

Although I wasn't able to be in Vermont on Thursday for the Bob & Chris Roadshow or the VS2008 Installfest, I have gotten emails from Chris Bowen and others letting me know that it was a great success. Over 40 people showed up for the installfest, and I learned from Dave Burke's blog that they also had TWO XB0X 360's set up for folks to play with.

Larry Keyes blogged his extensive notes from the day.

Sorry to have missed it.

What I really enjoyed reading was Dave Burke's epiphany about VS2008. The sessions from Bob & Chris really made things click for him and he's ready to get in bed wiht VS2008. I was thinking about that becasue he said he's seen LINQ 4 times before, but not until Thursday did he finally get to his AHA! moment with it. I believe this may have a lot to do with the fact that it's finished, it's deployed and in hand, rather than seeing very early bits (we've had 3 LINQ talks at VTdotNET in the last 1 1/2 years).

Sam Druker spends an hour talking in depth about Entity Framework in this new channel 9 video.

After I left Seattle, rather than going home as I had planned I ended up going to my parent's house (where I still am) to attend a funeral after which I was whisked up to Canastota NY where my mom was camped out with two pregnant dogs (Celeste and Bumper) near her fabulous vet (Village Vet in Canastota) waiting for the right time to do c-sections and bring the pups into the world. Celeste had 6 beautiful puppies yesterday and I drove them back to Binghamton and am now helping out with her pups as well as the 2 week old litter of 17. Mom and my sister are still in Canastota with Bumper and they will be doing (they = vet, not my mom & sister) doing her c-section today with an expectation of 10 or more puppies.

In the meantime, what did I miss?

We were sent the entire transcript of our conversation with Bill Gates earlier this week. Keith Peters is posting it (in sections) on his blog.

Entity Framework Beta3 and the CTP2 of the tools were released.  (Also, here's a  list of breaking changes) I've only been waiting for this for months and I can't even look at it right now because I am responsible for precious little lives.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.)

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.

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.

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!

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. 

Read all about it here...

[A New DevLife Post]