IdeaBlade has a 45 minute webcast demonstrating their Entity Framework implementation. They have taken EF and plugged it into their pre-existing framework which already knows how to do a lot of the things that the EF APIs can't do yet. They also have extended the design tools (even with a pluralizer sniff sniff). They have extended the EDMX by adding additional attributes (which apparently won't prevent the model from being used elsewhere) and replace the objectContext with their own object manager.

I'm really impressed. Because they already had their framework that they could plug EF into, they are light years ahead of me, who is starting from scratch trying to figure out how to make EF do these things on it's own - which in some cases is not an easy task.

Some of the things that DEF can do that I am struggling with are

• Use objects across tiers
• Use objects across tiers without needing EF on the client
• Roll back changes to the object cache
• Query the object cache without hitting the database.

There's more, but it's too depressing to keep listing. I'm just kidding about it being depressing. I'm actually very happy to see someone prove that the EDM and the Entity Framework can be used (even if it takes some tweaking) in real enterprise applications.

I'm also a little envious. It would have been fun to work on this project with all of the resources and existing IP they had at their disposal.

Check out the video.

I am in the terribly pathetic position of having to try to let people know about my workshop because it was inadvertantly ommitted from the printed brochure which has been inserted in the past few issues of MSDN Magazine and aspNetPRO magazine.

My workshop is listed on the website and the online schedule, but not in the printed brochure, so I think lots of people who may be interested, will not even be aware of it.

This is the start of the full Data Access track at DevConnections. We'll have non-stop data access sessions for four straight days!

Here is a link to the Pre-Conference Workshop page.

SO here it is again:

VPR204: ADO.NET Entity Framework: From 0 to 60 (9:00am - 4:00pm)
Add'l Fee $399
Julia Lerman
This full day workshop will provide you with a full overview of the soon-to-be released ADO.NET Entity Framework, Microsoft's new core data platform. In this workshop, you will learn what the Entity Framework is and how it fits into your application and enterprise architecture. We will begin with an introduction to the Entity Data model, how to build it, and how to implement it in its simplest form. Then you will learn how to take advantage of the true power of the Entity Data Model by creating customized mappings and implementing it in real-world multi-tier architectures. You will learn how to query Entity Data Models using LINQ to Entities, Entity SQL with Object Services, and stream data with Entity Client. The workshop will also explore some of the more complex features of object services as well as offer guidance as to when and where to you will want to use the Entity Data Model and which of its core querying methods is right for different scenarios.

I'll be doing this workshop in at the Developer Summit in Stockholm on April 11th as well.

To our right is Code Camp 9 in Waltham April 5-6.

To our left is the first Code Camp in Albany, Tech Valley Code Camp, April 19th. I'll be on a plane to Orlando that day for DevConnections.

From INETA:

Code Camp 9 has a beautiful new logo created by Bryan Philips.

Chris Bowen reports that the session for the April 5-6 Code Camp are filling up and the registrations are as well. At last count there are 40 sessions submitted.

Deadline for abstract submission is March 24th.

There is an introductory track this year which is a great opportunity for people who are new to presenting to do a session. In addition, Chalk Talks are a fabulous way to lead a conversation about something that you are interested in wtihout having to do the work of preparing a session and demos or worry about standing in front of an audience giving  presentation.

Submit sessions and register at www.TheDevCommunity.org.

As a book-writing newbie, I have had to learn to say "no" when I'm used to always saying "yes". For example, I just turned down an invitation to speak at a conference in India. I've never been to India. I hope I'll get invited again.

But you know it's serious when I had to say "no" to watching the first NEW episode in forever of Two and a Half Men last night. It pained me to hear Rich laughing his butt off while I stayed in front of my computer and tried to keep focused.

It's gotten to the point that I was grumbling about having to go to a Dr. appointment on Monday. But I figured, heck, if I die, I can't work anyway, so I might as well go and make sure I'm okay. Luckily it wasn't a doctor who work in the mental health field. Surely they would have locked me up immediately!

Then of course there's the skiing and other forms of exercise that I'm not getting. Thankfully (for me, not for the Mad River Glen's finances) the snow has been dreadful lately.

My saving grace was that the power went out yesterday for an hour. SO I went outside and took a "brisk walk" (is that a sign of age? Not even a run!).

I was thrilled this evening when Rich presented me with an altered part to an old bike trainer that I was hoping to use at least to get some spinning in. The trainer didn't fit my bike. So Rich altered the part and now it fits. Yay. Of course, I'm not on it, I'm working (well, blogging only for a momentary diversion).

It just occurred to me that this blog post sounds like an Andy Rooney commentary. Egad! Well back to work. Tick tick tick.

Red-Gate is one of those companies that you just can't help but love. They produce phonemenally useful and popular developer /data developer tools, and the community facing people are a joy to work with. It doesn't surprise me that this stems from a company with a good soul. So it's no surprise (but still quite nice) to read that they have been chosen (for the 2nd year in a row) as one of the "Top 100 Best Small Companies to Work For" in the U.K. by the Sunday Times. Read more on Red-Gates's website.

Scott Galloway recently joined the ASP.NET team as a P.M. for ASP.NET 3.5. Congratulations!

My conspiracy theory is that Microsoft is actually building a new team for a new product called Scott.NET.

Who's next? Scott Mitchell? Scott Watermasysk? K.Scott Allen? There are still a LOT of ASP.NET Scotts not yet on the payroll.

The DataDeveloper.NET website has got some new bling!

I'm using one on the home page of my blog so it's easy for visitors to my blog to find it.

As per my previous blog post, I have just installed CR2008 Service Pack 0 and tested a report that I was unable to run when I upgraded from CRXI to CR2008. Not only did the bug go away, but now I am experiencing some amazing performance gains thanks to the new version of Crystal Reports. Read more here

[A New DevLife Post]

In my article, What Visual Studio Developer Should Know about Crystal Reports 2008, for ASPAlliance, I pointed out the fact that CR2008 integrates with VS2003 and VS2005 but NOT VS2008 and that this would be eventually be rectified with a Service Pack.

Thanks to Guy Barrette's blog post "Will the real Crystal Reports 2008 stand up?", (and because I still can't figure out how to subscribe to the Crystal Reports team blog), I learned that the service pack that fixes this is out.

The Crystal Report's blog post about the service pack [Crystal Reports 2008 Service Pack 0] details the changes. Those related to Flash integration and Business Objects Enterprise connectivity aren't of interest to me, per se, but the VS2008 integration definitely is. It also says that CR2008 now runs on Windows 64 bit O/S.

The blog also points out that "It is also now available through the Update Service.  Use Help > Check for Updates within Crystal Reports 2008 to update your version. " but since my 30 day trial ran out I didn't realize this. Now it's time for me to see if the other showstopper problem for me has been resolved.

I'll report back.

[thanks to Roger Jennings for the correction about spatial data]

Samir Bajaj, a developer on the Entity Framework team has begun his blog with a bang.

He describes a sample application (available on MSDN Code Gallery) that can switch  between LINQ to SQL or ENtity Framework, highlighting the differences between the two.

The application targets an business case that he is very familiar with  - searching  a database filled with drawings which are based on a collection of shapes. Samir has a background working for a CAD company and explains that it is a common task to search for drawings that contain particular shapes.

Thanks to SQL Server 2008's new spatial data, this gets really interesting.

Added: While SQL Server 2008's spatial data may have been an inspiration, it will not be not supported by LINQ to SQL or EF in the near future, so Samir is using his own techniques with SQL Server 2005.

Check out his blog post and then the app, called Sketchpad (requires SQL Server 2008 CTP)

THANK YOU!!!

Okay, my poor little ego is saved... I thought I was doing something horribly wrong with the new Silverlight tools, but it wasn't me after all. Read more....

[A New DevLife Post]

A few days ago I wrote that I had learned about some of the new goodies in SQL Server 2008 that would be of interest to developers after watching Rick Dyess' video, What about Developers? SQL Server 2008 and the Development Environment"

It must have been a busy day last December when another similarly enlightening email arrived in my inbox. Michael Campbell wrote a post for .NET Briefing entitled "SQL Server 2008: What's New for Developers?"

Surprisingly there's only a small overlap between the features that Rick highlights and those which Michael highlights, which means I get to learn more stuff!

While I have this in my inbox, I can't find the post anywhere on the originating blog on the WindowsDevPro website, so I'll highlight the things Michael wrote about:

The MERGE statement in t-sql lets you provide data for the database without having to predetermine if it's an insert or an update. Today you first have to query to see if the primary key exists or not. If not, do an Insert, otherwise do an update. Very cool.

Table-Valued parameters lets you pass shaped data as parameters to a stored procedure. Cool again, or as Michaeal calls it, "wicked".

While Rick also talked about the HierarchyID, Michael pointed out something interesting about it: "What’s cool, or interesting, about this data type though, is that it’s an intrinsic CLR data-type – meaning that Microsoft is starting to leverage Common Language Runtime functionality natively. I wonder what other CLR additions we’ll see in the future."

Intellisense, though I'm already a big fan of Red-Gate's SQL Prompt, which constantly saves me from having to go poke around tables that I haven't worked with in eons before I start building my queries, not to mention the help wiht operators and functions. I wonder how the built in Intellisense compares?

GROUPING SETS which work with teh GROUP BY clause to simplify grouping that you might otherwise perform by using a UNION ALL clause on a bunch of GROUP BY clauses.

XXL User Defined Data Types (the XXL is my term, not official). UDDTs can exceed 8000 bytes.

Thanks Mikey!

From last week's The New Yorker:

Rick Dyess from Solid Quality Learning recorded a quick (12 minute) talking-head video explaining the new features of SQL Server 2008 that would be of interest to developers. It's called "What about Developers? SQL Server 2008 and the Development Environment"  As I haven't been paying huge attention to SS2008, I definitely wanted to see this.

You may have heard about some new date types: e.g. a Date that you don't constantly have to strip the time out of and a time that you don't have to extract out of a DateTime field - thank heavens!

There's also a file stream type that stores the stream in the file system but keeps a pointer in the database to it. We often do this manually. So now SQL Server will take care of the plumbing for you.

I hadn't been aware of the hierarchical type which lets you keep track of hierarchies between objects. I have to actually see this in action to understand it better.

There is also a geospatial type that will probably make a lot of people happy. It's over my head.

SQL Server 2008 takes care of a problem that I wasn't even aware of. Rick explains that when you have a null in a column, it will take up the full space allocated to the column. That's a lot of wasted space for containing "nothing". SO that's been fixed. Null will take up no space.

There are other features that he quickly reviews in the video such as improvements to Service Broker (e.g. it knows how to prioritize the services).

One thing I found confusing was the way he presented LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework (including EF's object services). LINQ to SQL is a feature that is [extremely] useful for developers accessing a SQL Server Database. Entity Framework is a feature that is [extremely] useful for developers accessing any database which has an E.F. provider available. Rick presented these as "new features of SQL Server 2008" although I don't really think he actually meant to suggest that these are features OF SQL Server 2008. But unfortunately, that's how the message comes across. It's not the end of the world, but a bit misleading (again, I believe wholly unintentional).There's also "coming soon" book listed on Amazon with the confusing (to me) title of "Pro SQL Server 2008 Entity Framework", from APress. But then again, Roger Jennings pointed out that the title of my own book "Programming Entity Framework" is odd given that Dave Sceppa's book is called "Programming the Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework". I know my title was created by O'Reilly to fit into the "Programming" series at O'Reilly, so perhaps the APress book is following some in-house pattern as well.

Anyway, the video from Rick was a very quick and helpful way for me to do a quick, high-level, catch-up.

Jeff McWherter wrote an article on ASPAlliance called Six Quick Crystal Reports Design Tips.

When I first read through them I laughed at two in particular.

One was how to get check boxes to appear on a report. I struggled with this one a few years ago and now use it frequently. Why didn't I just ask Jeff back then? (Oh yea, I didn't know him)

The other is using a DRAFT watermark. I have been doing this for a long time, however I am using a jpeg and because of the way CR handles embedded images, the JPEG (even one that is 24kb) adds about 100 - 300 KB to the DLL. I spent a LOT of time trying to deal with this. Jeff shows how to just use text. TEXT! I never even thought of this! I will definitely be changing those reports.

The other four were all new to me!

While many of us are still struggling to get our entity objects across tiers, keep change tracking in place, keep graphs together, DevForce seems to have figured it out.

They are now touting their new DEF (DevForce Entity Framework) which going into Beta 1 soon.

You can sign up for the beta and check out some of their resources here.

Me? I'll still struggle. I want to  figure (and lavish the process of figuring) out how it works. Really, I don't want to ski; I don't want to hang out with my dogs or hubby; I certainly don't EVER want to go on a vacation. Nope, no shortcuts for moi!

There's more to tell, but I'm supposed to be prepping for my user group presentation that's tonight.

What I'm happy about is that it's that this can be done in a flexible, reusable way; even if it's still a little (yes, I know that's probably a bit of an understatement, as was that) hard right now.

I thought that this was worth highlighting.

ADO.NET Data Services has a newer moniker:

ADO.NET Data Services Framework

While I still prefer "Astoria", adding "framework" now encompasses the fact that there are client APIs as well, not just the services.