A great video of a local fundrasier - over a thousand people jumping into the very icy Lake Champlain on a cold day

 

I haven't tried it out yet, but there's never an end to needing tools to help save your butt when you are trying to code XSLT. This one is from Microsoft's XML Tools team.

I have a few rules when I'm sick including no coffee, minimal caffeine, no sugar and no dairy. I had a bad chest cold for 3 weeks, and followed that rule pretty well. Now that I'm feeling better, I'm trying to see how long I can go without coffee. I still crave it but eventually that will go away too. So far I have survived!  The challenge will be tomorrow since our user group meeting is right across the road from a Starbucks! And of course, my fave is latte's (I blame Michele for turning me on to their Vanilla Lattes ;) which is coffee AND sugar AND dairy all together. I'd call that an addiction.

I can't say I have had no caffeine though since I am now drinking English Breakfast tea and plenty of Green Tea too.

I am, like to-oh-tally suscribed to the WebDevTools blog, dude! Here's why

[A New DevLife Post]

I seem to frequently point people to the technical story of MySpace as they went through the painful evolution that eventually led them to have a serious ASP.NET website to manage what is one of the highest traffic websites in the world. Even if it's not ASP.NET that you  choose, it's a good lesson in planning ahead. Read more...

[A New DevLife Post]

Jessica Fosler has a very funny YouTube video of a Sesame Street Cookie Monster clone interacting with a "totally indestructable" machine.

She also has some great WPF UI posts that I need to dig into ...

I'll be doing a DotNetRocks show with Carl and Richard about the Entity Framework. Danny Simmons was on DNR last April so it's definitely time for an update!

 

Now that the Team System's Unit Testing tools are built in to VS2008 Pro, many of us will finally get a chance to take a look at it.

Luckily I know some VSTS experts who aren't too far away and we have Sarah Cameron coming down from Montreal to teach us all about how to use the built-in Unit Testing in VS2008 on Monday. We have a bunch of NUnit users in the group and they are also curious about how the Microsoft version stacks up. Interestingly this session is drawing out a lot of people who have never been to a VTdotNET meeting before! Go Sarah!

Read more at www.vtdotnet.org!

From Mad River's website this morning:

POWDER CENTRAL at Mad River Glen today as we picked up a solid 12" overnight. This on top of the 8-10" yesterday, on top of the 4-6" from the day before that so we will be approaching EPIC skiing conditions today on Gen. Stark Mountain. I was no math major but I think that like 2 feet in the past 3 days! It continues to dump snow vigorously and the best part is it should continue to do so all day with well over a foot total expected. Actually the best part really is that yet another big storm is winding up to wallop us again this weekend

So after a lifetime of learning how to ski on hard packed snow and ice (we're talking eastern skiing), I'm now having to learn how to ski in real powder. My skis are too skinny, that's for sure. But if I find powder that is a little fluffier, I'm turning like a champ. If it's too heavy I unexpectedly revert to the snowplow I learned when I was 6 years old.Well, at least it's a really soft landing when you fall. When my ego and my energy level fail me, I can always fall back on that old excuse: "ummm, I have to go home and get back to work!"

From TEKsystems 

 

These jobs are getting listed on thingamajob.com, but not all of them seem to be there yet. Here's a direct link to TEKsystem's listings.

 

Title                 Software Developer

Location:         Stowe

Number of openings:  3

Responsibilities: 

Software Developers provide the technical expertise to create enhancements, code corrections, and new functionality.   Software Developers fulfill both the support and development programming roles and work in teams with other developers, support, QA and management when appropriate.

 

Requirements

·      Minimum of 3 years experience developing and supporting software applications in a Windows environment.

·      Four year college degree or equivalent experience – Bachelor’s degree desired.

·      Able to learn and master new technology quickly and improve personal performance through continual self-study.

·      Desire to provide outstanding products and customer service.

·      Able to work on multiple projects simultaneously and to cope with diversity and complexity in a high-pressure, rapidly changing environment.

·      Strong interpersonal and team relationship skills and able to work well individually or as part of a team.

·      Demonstrated understanding of the following: Windows 2000, XP, and 2003 Server in conjunction with software development.

·      Experience utilizing one or more of the following:  SQL Server 2000/2005, .NET.

·      Ability to maintain high degree of confidentiality concerning development products.

·      Detailed knowledge of one or more SMS software products helpful (i.e., two or more years of installation, product management, or systems support experience) or able to thoroughly learn SMS software products.

·      Demonstrated technical writing ability and basic email skills.

·      Extremely detail oriented and dedicated to follow-through in all work with a focus on project quality, completeness, and thoroughness.

 

 

Title                 Senior Software Developer

Location:         Stowe

Number of openings:   2

Responsibilities: 

Senior Software Developers provide the technical expertise and leadership to create technical architectures and designs, enhancements, code corrections, and new functionality.   Senior Software Developers fulfill both the support and development programming roles and work in teams with other developers, support, QA and management when appropriate.

 

Requirements

·      Minimum of 5-7 years experience developing and supporting web based applications in a Windows environment.

·      Four year college degree or equivalent experience – Bachelor’s degree desired.

·      Able to learn and master new technology quickly and improve personal performance through continual self-study.

·      Desire to provide outstanding products and customer service.

·      Able to work on multiple projects simultaneously and to cope with diversity and complexity in a high-pressure, rapidly changing environment.

·      Strong interpersonal and team relationship skills and able to work well individually or as part of a team.

·      Demonstrated understanding of the following: Windows 2000, XP, and 2003 Server in conjunction with software development.

·      Experience utilizing one or more of the following: SQL Server 2000/2005, .NET.

·      Ability to maintain high degree of confidentiality concerning development products.

·      Detailed knowledge of one or more SMS software products helpful (i.e., two or more years of installation, product management, or systems support experience) or able to thoroughly learn SMS software products.

·      Demonstrated technical writing ability and basic email skills.

·      Extremely detail oriented and dedicated to follow-through in all work with a focus on project quality, completeness, and thoroughness.

 

Contact

      Alicia Ferraro

aferraro@teksystems.com

TEKsystems - Boston, MA

111 Speen Street Suite 520 Framingham, MA  01701

One of the drawbacks with the partial postbacks in AJAX is that you can't go forward or back in your web browser to different states of the page created by the partial postbacks. Nor can you create a shortcut to one of the views.

The ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions has functionality in there to enable these scenarios. It's pretty simple to pull off thanks to the new tools.

Jonathan Carter has a great post on how to use this. It's just #1 of more to come so keep tuned. Jonathan is a new to Microsoft's Visual Studio Developer Platform and Evangelism team with the dream job of writing and speaking about all the cool things you can do in VS. You can tell by his post that he will be a great resource for us to learn new features.

I mentioned a few days ago that Matthieu Mezil will be presenting on Entity Framework at TechDays 2008 in Paris next week.

There are more at this conference!

• LINQ & Entity Framework: Fabrice Marguerie & Sebastien Ros
• ADO.NET Data Service: Mitsu FUruta & Pierre Lagarde
• There are also a bunch of LINQ talks - too many to list, in fact!

And there are more EF talks upcoming at other conferences as well!  (Including my own, of course )

DevWeek in London March 10-14:
 "Understanding the ADO.NET Entity Framework" (Mike Taulty)
 "Patterns of use with the new Entity Framework" (James Winters)
This looks like a great conference filled with a huge list of rock star speakers, although, oddly, it's all men. I wonder if that will impact female attendance (either positively, thanks to all those good looking, brainy guys or negatively, if they are afraid they will feel out of place.)

There don't seem to be any EF talks at VSLive for San Francisco or Orlando. Too bad.

Developer Summit 2008 April 9-11 in Stockholm
   Full Day Workshop on Entity Framework (by me Yay, I get to go to Sweden!)
   ADO.NET Data Services (by WCF & Web Services guru: Christian Weyer)
   Advanced Entity Framework: EDM in the Enterprise (by me)

DevConnections (April 20 - 23 Orlando) has a whole Data Access track now!
   Full Day Workshop on Entity Framework (by me) on April 20th
   During the conference Proper:
   On Microsoft Day, 2 EF sessions, an Astoria Session and a guidance session on choosing from the myriad data access tools
  On the third party days, 2 EF sessions by John Papa, 1 by me and 1 by Kathleen Dollard (and additional ADO.NET sessions as well!). I'll also be doing a session on ADO.NET Data Services in the ASP Connections track.

DevTeach (May 12-15 Toronto)
   Intro to Entity Framework (Barry Gervin)
   An Advanced EF session and a data access guidance session by me

If you know of any others, send me a note and I'll list it!

One of the major accomplishments of EF Beta3 was that the performance of materializing objects through Object Services (that means with Linq to Entities or with Entity SQL) was improved significantly. So significantly that  they are almost comparable with querying through EntityClient which streams data into a datareader.

I did a number of experiments that I hadn't blogged about yet but did ask on the forums [EF: Best way to compare apples to apples when comparing perf of materialized objects vs datareader?] where I learned that ViewGeneration was the most time consuming part of the query process.

In the end, I had found this when performing the same query with LINQ to Entities, with EntityClient and with ADO.NET after separating the ViewGeneration time out in order to do fair comparisons. You can use EDMGen to pre-compile a query so that the expense of ViewGeneration becomes negligible at runtime.

• ViewGeneration: ranges around 1110 milliseconds
• Iterate through Materialized Objects: 14 to 15 ms
• Iterate EDM shaped data through datareader: 17 to 18 ms
• Iterated sqlclient datareader (classic ado.net): about 4 ms

BUT! Even better, Brian Dawson has written an extensive blog post about performance in Entity Framework: Exploring the Performance of the ADO.NET Entity Framework - Part 1. The post is filled with charts and graphs and is very enlightening. Brian even has a pie chart showing ViewGeneration as 56% of the time for performing a query.

The post digs very deeply into the query and object materialization pipeline, which, to someone like me, is dangerously close to pillow talk!

And it's only Part 1!

Matthieu Mezil is presenting on Entity Framework and LINQ (and VSTO) at next week's first (?) .NET event in Paris: TechDays 2008.

I wanted to see what else was going on and found the website (by BrainSonic) and boy is this a fantastic Silverlight implementation. Even if you don't know French, I highly recommend checking out the website, if for no other reason than to be inspired!

This is just but a small tidbit. After searching for Mezil, it spun (literally) these three items on to the calendar.

There's more, but I'll let you go play with it yourself.

Matthieu has been building up his EF expertise as well as using the forums as a means to challenge himself to learning more and sharing what he's learned.

Congrats to Jim Wooley, Fabrice Marguerie and Steve Eichert! And THANKS for writing it. It's been a long haul! I have really been anticipating this book!

I am part of United's mileage plus program and thanks to the way-too-much travelling I do, am a premier member. (I would have to fly 50,000 a year to get to the next level and I cannot imagine travelling that much more!)

I just received an email alerting me that United is going to start charging $25 for a second checked bag. This doesn't apply to me because I have "status" with my miles. With the rising cost of fuel, I suppose it isn't too surprising and possibly an interesting way to avoid raising airfares across the board significantly. This way, you just pay a little extra if you are loading more stuff onto the plane.

But geeze, what's next, airfare based on weight?

Burlington geeks from the itty bitty little market that can get 120 peope to who up at an MSDN event , will have to plan a road trip if they want to attend an official Launch event for VS2008, SQL SErver 2008 and Windows 2008 Server. There will be one in Boston on March 18 and one in Albany on May 23.

However, we will have two INETA/Microsoft/PASS sponsored launch events through the VTdotNET and VTSQL. VTSQL will have a "SQL Sever 2008 launch party" meeting on April 7th and VTdotNET's VS2008 Launch will be on April 14th. While we can't promise a copy of all three products to every attendee, hopefully we'll have licenses to give away. Fortunately, in December we were extremely lucky to have a VS2008 Install Fest where over 40 licenses to VS2008 Pro were given away to Vermont.NET User Group members, thanks to Chris Bowen.

At VTdotNET's last meeting, we were happy to have Jeff McWherter share with us his hard-earned lessons about improving performance in asp.net apps. Jeff spends a lot of time dealing with this in his job and it was very obvious that he wasn't just sharing something he read about, but his very adept experience.

He started out by posing what may seem a redundant question, but is a really good way of getting people to focus on the issues. He asked for someone to explain the difference between web site performance and web site scalability.

These were the two topics he focused on as he delved into a number of performance bottlenecks as well as issues which prevent websites from being able to scale out. Jeff used a variety of performance measurement tools in the process which was very educational. Sure beats waiting for the server to come to it's knees as an indication that some changes might need to be made! Then of course he showed us lots of ways, some very simple, some more complex, to solve the problems displayed by the tools.

Often people focus on their specific asp.net code and don't consider out of scope processes that may be causing the problems such as a database query or a file download. I was happy that he made sure people were aware of SQLProfiler!

One of the tips that really hit home for me, because I was dealing with this problem, was if you have file download/upload functions in your application, split those off to another process, whether you can do that on another server or just in another app on your web server (e.g a web service). It's not just the time involved (which can be helped also by doing this asynchronously) but the resources involved. If multiple people are uploading or downloading at the same time, this could really pose a problem.

In these days where many of us are scrambling to learn the new technologies that are coming down the pipe, it is a huge benefit to have someone show us how to get more out of the tools that we are working with today with lessons that will apply to the tools of the future.

The day after the meeting, Jeff and his wife (who had spent a fun few days with us at our house) headed off to Smuggler's Notch to do some ice climbing and then were going to be on vacation for a while after that visiting friends around the Northeast.

I think he's back in Michigan now, so I'll be sure to get his list of resources from him and up on the VTdotNET site.

I change my mind daily about going to MIX.

I WANT TO GO TO MIX. The registrations are dwindling and it will soon be sold out.

But I don't want to deal with this:

SOUTH BURLINGTON -- Today's ice storm has caused numerous delays and cancellations this afternoon at Burlington International Airport, airport officials said.

Between about 3 and 5 p.m., there are expected to have been two delayed and two canceled arrivals, and another four or five delays and two canceled departures from the airport, said airport Facilities Manager Brian Searles.

"Right now, it's really all about where flights are coming from," said Searles. "We're operational here."

Searles said a continuing ice-build up could force the airport to close at some point this evening.

People should call the the airlines for more information on their flight, Searles said.

[source today's burlington free press]

This article doesn't even mention the winds that have been howling the past 6 hours. It's not much fun to be in a plane that is landing in high winds on ice covered runways. Been there done that.

And then there's always the fun at O'Hare. Last April we sat onthe runway for 2 hours when we landed at O'Hare, got on another plane and sat there for 3 hours before we took off. Bah!

In my post about rewriting Brad Abram's MVC + Entity Framework example in VB, I pointed out a better way to query a collection of objects and return their entity references (eg, query products and bring along the category information) without writing a scary query filled with references, checks for nulls, etc.

But there was something bothering me about the query.

I went from this (Brad's)

List<Product> products =TheProducts.Where(c => c.Category.CategoryName == category).ToList();
//prepare the view by explicitly loading the categories  
products.FindAll(p => p.Category == null).ForEach(p => p.CategoryReference.Load()); 

To this

     var _prod = Northwind.Categories.
              Where(c => c.CategoryName == id).
              OrderBy(c => c.CategoryName).
              Select(c => c.Products).
              First().ToList();

Which gives the same effect of ending up with a set of products and being able to drill into product.category.categoryname, etc.

But that query represents something that Entity Framework is not supposed to do, and I asked Danny Simmons about it.

Entity Framework will not perform actions that you did not request. I selected only products in my projection, yet I also got back categories. It was convenient, but it was against the promise of EF. I didn't ask for categories.

In the end, a bug was filed, because indeed, that shouldn't be happening.

However, it's still VERY easy to explicitly tell EF to bring along a collection (eg if I query categories I can say "and give me those products while your at it) or an entity ref (query products and ask for the category) by using Include.

Here's the same query for the MVC view even simpler.

    var _products = Northwind.Products.Include("Category").
        Where(p => p.Category.CategoryID == 1).ToList();

There are other ways to achieve this as well, but for this scenario, this is the most streamlined (as far as I know ).