Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and founder of the GNU Project (http://www.gnu.org/), will be speaking in the Burlington area on April 17 and 18.

  o  Thursday, April 17, 4:30 p.m., St. Michael's College; "Copyright versus Community in the Age of Computer Networks"

  o  Friday, April 18, 9:30 a.m., Champlain College; "The Free Software Movement and the GNU/Linux Operating System"

GNU is "free software" and a different concept from open source software. Per the GNU Web site...

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"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech”, not as in “free beer”.

Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:

    * The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

    * The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

    * The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).

    * The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

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The GNU/Linux system, basically the GNU operating system with Linux added, is used on tens of millions of computers today.  Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award, and the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as several honorary doctorates.

After attending Mix n Mash 08 at Microsoft, I wrote an essay called "The Magic of Software" that is in the April 08 issue of MSDN Magazine. The issue (including the essay) is now online.

FrontPorchForum, a local, very innovative community website that started here in the Burlington area, has made the cut from 5,000 community organizations to be on the shortlist of 20 to possibly win a $25,000 grant from the Case Foundation. Case Foundation will aware these grants to 5 organizations based on public voting.

So you can vote for 5 of the last 20 organizations on the list. I went to the site on behalf of FPF and was happy to see an organization from my home town (Syracuse, NY) on the list and was able to vote for them as well. Even if you don't find a local organization on the list of 20, there will surely be at least 5 that inspire you. So go help them out and vote!

I'm used to seeing TechEd ads on many of the sites that I go to since they are developer sites. So it took a few minutes for it to register when I saw the ad on the website of our local newspaper, the Burlington Free Press.

I've been seeing them frequently for days now. This is a pretty small market and it's surprising to me that they would be advertising here, but perhaps it's part of a sweeping media buy and they didn't explicitly choose Burlington. If I didn't know better, I'd really wonder if they just weren't using spyware to detect that I have VIsual Studio on my computer and therefore serving up this perfectly targetted ad. There are also a few other Microsoft ads showing up there, for example, one for MS Online Services.

While this has been an unfolding process on Ruurd's blog and on the CodePlex/EFContrib site, today marks an impressive day in the evolution of the PostSharp4EF project that Ruurd Boeke has been working on.

He has used the available interfaces for IPOCO in Entity Framework to create a tool for using Entity Framework in a way that is more affable to Domain Driven developers.

His solution enables client side classes that are not dependant on Entity Framework APIs and supports a fully disconnected tiered application - the thing we have all been struggling to achieve.

Ruurd also solved the XML Serialization problem along the way, though in the meantime, changes to WCF actually solve the problem across the board for all WCF XML Serialization, including Entity Framework objects. So I'm sure that was frustrating for him to have this announced shortly after he completed that arduous step, but think of how much you learned, Ruurd and how much respect you have earned as well!

Here is short description of the project. You can find much more on the PostSharp4EF project site under the CodePlex/EFContrib home as well as on Ruurd's blog.

PostSharp4EF: Automatically implement IPoco This project uses PostSharp to post-compile your assemblies. When it encounters a simple attribute, it will implement everything needed to use it in EF: Typelevel attributes, EDMscalar attributes, changetracking and default values. This means there are no runtime performance penalties. See Introducing EF Contrib post for more detailed information about this project. The following supporting projects are included as well and will enable the use of full disconnected n-tier usage of your domain objects:

• Circular Serializer: enables the serialization of object graphs (including circular references) with knowledge of 'original values'.
• Editable Business Objects: does changetracking and provides the serializer with the correct values

I've been fiddling some more with mashing up ADO.NET Data Services using popfly.

I started a few months ago then set it aside.

Today, I extended my mashup block which serves up data from Northwind using an ADO.NET Data Service, then hooked it up to a geocoder block to transform city/country to lat/long, then hooked that up to a virtual earth map.

This is a little test popfly mashup that I created from an Astoria data service. You can read the blog post about how I created the data source component here.

On Friday, I did a full day workshop on Entity Framework called Entity Framework 0-60. Well, I translated it into the local measurement and renamed it 0-100 (km).

One of the comments I got back from an attendee was:

"It was a great overview on a really interesting topic. It was a bit more complex than I expected so it was good to get the expert’s view"

"A bit more complex." This is definitely one of the things that makes EF so difficult to teach or to write about. Even in 6 hours there's so much that I have to glaze over. I tried not to linger in introductory information which they can get more easily elsewhere and spent more time teaching some of the things that are not so obvious and harder to grasp. The last 45 minutes was free form as I invited them to pick my brain and take advantage of all that I have learned so far. I plan to do that again in upcoming workshops.

I think one of the critical things I shared with them during the day was something that is also common to any LINQ queries, which is that you can very easily and unknowingly make trips to the database when you think you are just looking at only the cached objects. When I first mentioned this, the room went silent and their eyes got very big, so I realized that I better spend a little more time exploring this than I had planned.

I'm doing this workshop again this coming Sunday at DevConnections in Orlando (still seats available!) and I expect the day to transpire very differently than it did in Sweden this past Friday. I even completely reorganized the slides on my way home from Sweden because I learned a lot from the questions and reactions of Friday's attendees.

Yes, Entity Framework is complex. And, as the day progressed, I surprised myself with how much I have really learned about this technology. And I seem to have a Rolodex in my head with listings of forums threads and blog posts that I frequently referred to which was very handy.

Jeremy Miller and David Laribee explain ALT.NET on DotNETRocks.

Today: Sunny, with a high near 56. West wind between 7 and 10 mph.

Wednesday: Sunny, with a high near 66. South wind between 5 and 15 mph.

Thursday: Sunny, with a high near 72. South wind between 5 and 13 mph.

Friday: Sunny, with a high near 70.

Saturday: Sunny, with a high near 69.

Director, IT Business Systems Team - Information Technology
Reports to:            Vice President for Information Technology
Location:               Brattleboro, VT 
 
 
General Description: 
The senior member of the IT Business Systems Team, the Director, IT Business
Systems Team is responsible for working with the CIO to set the vision for the
Application Development for the organizations Information Technology. This individual
has demonstrated the ability to analyze and implement business solution using various
application development technologies.
 
Primary Responsibilities:
•         Working with CIO and IT Senior Management team to lead short term and long
term planning for the IT organization
•         Interview, gather, analyze, and produce business requirements based upon
business need within the organization
•         Leads efforts with IT and Business Management to determine best solution
•         Leads IT team members to design, analyze, code, test, implement and
document solutions for business problems
•         Ability to transition IT organization to new application development technologies
•        Maintains and enhances IT solutions for business areas
•         Work with outside vendors to provide support for the organizations Application environment
•         Recruit, lead, coach, and mentor members of the Business System team
•         Perform Project Management functions for the Application Development projects
•         Stay current with major trends and information technology approaches and tools
•         Make recommendation to business area to improve business processes
 
Required Qualifications:
•         BA in related field or equivalent experience.
•         At least 8 – 9 years experience in a similar position.
•         Proven success designing and/or selecting, and implementing application
solutions in a global environment
•         Ability to collaborate with heads of program units to understand their challenges
and implement technology solutions 
•         Knowledge and experience with Microsoft SQL, Business Objects (Crystal
Reports), Coldfusion, and Microsoft  Access.
•         Microsoft .Net experience or demonstrated proficiency in object oriented
languages
•         Understanding and proficiency in building web based applications
•         Ability to demonstrate strong skills in information needs analysis, requirements
creation, development and testing in a Windows environment.
•         Experience working with central corporate MIS systems.
•         Strong organizational skills and excellent attention to detail.
•         Strong interpersonal skills with excellent patience, clarity of communications
and commitment to team approaches, strong leadership and negotiation skills.
 
Desired Qualifications:
•         Relevant experience working in a not-for-profit, educational or international
organization.
•         Knowledge and experience with Windows operating systems and Windows
based programming languages
•         Experience supporting Datatel.
 
Skills:
•         Demonstrated Leadership capability (ability to motivate others to achieve
organization’s goals)
•         Strong Organizational skills and strong goal orientation
•         Strong Analytical Thinking (ability to identify and respond to complex situations)
•         Good Oral Communication (ability to convey and absorb information through
spoken words)
•         Good Written Communication (ability to write clearly and to understand written communications)
•         Strong Teamwork capability (capability to work with others in order to achieve a
common goal)

Contact:
Benjamin J. Scribner
Executive Recruiter
Gallagher Flynn & Company, LLP
(802) 651-7278
bscribner@gfc.com

In April 2008 issue of MSDN Magazine (April is not online yet, but in your mailbox), I wrote an {End Bracket} essay about Surface Computing, Microsoft's "Vision Quests" and CSI (yes, the T.V. show). A few weeks after the essay was finalized and headed to the printer, I turned on CSI and wouldncha know it, there was a Surface computer!

Update: Here's a link to the essay: The Magic of Software.

Between the many conversations I had with folks over the days about thinking, about Presentation Zen, about languages and about ALT.NET, I leave Sweden with my head filled with new ideas which I'm very excited about. Read more here...

[A DevLife Post]

These things tend to happen when I'm travelling and don't check my feeds for an entire day. I can't say this is a huge surprise since it's very sensible. I'm happy to finally have some tangible news from the team. I'll be happy to share this news in my Entity Framework workshop tomorrow! During the conference I actually had someone suggest that they still didn't believe that EF wouldn't go the way of Object Spaces. Sheesh!

Entity Framework & ADO.NET Data Services to Ship with VS 2008 SP1 & .NET 3.5 SP1

Wednesday, April 09, 2008, 7:02:00 PM | dpblogs

Just had to share this funny comment that came through my other blog. Not as a comment on a post but from the contact form.

"hi dear kese hoooooo i learn C# but i can't understand what should i do please tell me "

Doug Seven is one of the track chairs for the track that I'm speaking in at TechEd Developer. I was talking to him the other day about finding the line between the "Presentation Zen" type of presentation (where an extreme example would be a slide with nothing more than a smiley face on it) and a presentation that will be useful to attendees (or other downloaders) after the fact that has actual content on it as the presenter is no longer there to fill in the blanks.

He gave me a great suggestion - prepare two decks. take my typical "stand-alone" decks which is very dense, the make a copy of it and strip the copy down. Way down.

So many of the bullet points are things I'm talking about. Why should the attendees need to be destracted by so many details on the deck when I'm talking about them anyway?

But, and here's what's great about this idea - use the dense deck to share with attendees after the fact. All of the details that I talked about are now there right on the deck for their benefit.

I love this idea so much that I did it to my decks for the DevSummit. I have done one of my sessions already using the stripped down deck, then gave the stand-alone version of the deck to the track chair to put on the website.

I'm doing a silverlight talk this afternoon and cut the deck in half and on the remaining slides, removed a lot of content and replaced some of it with images instead. No smiley faces though.

I get to have my cake and eat it to and I think it's a win-win for the attendees during and after the live session.

I'm not a DBA. I've probably said that about 5000 times. So I am often pretty much out of the loop in the world of SQL Server. So, I really embarrassed myself today asking Niels Berglund if he was a SQL Server guy. I now realize that it would be like asking Kimberly Tripp if she was a SQL Server gal.

And because I am also on a mission to make sure that DBAs are at least aware that the EDM and Entity Framework supports stored procedures, I continued to dig my hole deeper by asking him if he knew that. Turns out he did a full day workshop on LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework at DevWeek in the U.K. I didn't know about this when I wrote a blog post about DevWeek.

So I will now be subscribing to Niels' blog along with Bob B's, since I'm always trying to better understand the DBA perspective on Entity Framework.

I attended Christian Weyer's Astoria sesson this morning at the DevSummit , one of the few not in Swedish that I could understand! In fact, I was surprised to walk into Tess Ferrandez's session and hear her speaking fluent Swedish. it turns out she lived in Sweden for a time.

Christian shared a brilliant quote in his session which was how to explain REST in one sentence. He got it from David Meggison's "REST - The Quick Pitch" blog post.

With REST, every piece of information has its own URL.

I have had to try to explain REST in my own Astoria talks and I am going to adopt this brilliant quote. Thank Christian!

We'll see if Christian survives his stay in Stockholm as he had quite a lot of fun (and it was hilarious I have to say) talking about the World Cup Soccer 2006. Hey, they only beat Sweden by 2 goals!  My only memory of the World Cup was all of the TechEd attendees swarmed swarmed around the many screens at the conference displaying the matches.

The snacks at the DevSummit in Stockhom speak loudly of the healthy living of the Swedes.

Here is fruit and some yummy mango banana smoothies!

I remember the year at TechEd just after Steve Ballmer slimmed down and got healthy. The afternoon snacsk of candy bars, chips and hostess cupcakes was replaced with healthier fare - baked potato chips, celery and carrot sticks, stuff like that. From one extreme to another.

The above is MUCH more my speed, though I was also quite happy to find bite sized toblerone bars at one of the vendor booths!

Spring has arrived in Vermont, but I'm leaving.

This afternoon I start my overnight journey to Stockholm where I will be participating in the Developer Summit 08 and have been working with Patrik Lowendahl and Mats Rydin who are coordinating. Patrik's company, Cornerstone is instrumental in this conference and everyone there has been wonderful in helping get me prepared.

I'm really looking forward to it. Stockholm is an incredibily beautiful city with lots of history and I've never been there before. Plus there's a great line up of speakers some who are friends that I always look forward to hanging out with and others who I am looking forward to finally meeting! And David Chappell, who is coming by way of Eilat Israel (a 2 day trip) from TechEd, is giving the keynote!

When I have asked anyone if they want me to bring anything back for them, they all have said "oh, yes, a beautiful Swede!" Well at least my single friends have made that request.

Swedish is not among the languages I ahve ever studied so I was happy to find some really useful lessons on Survival Phrases.com. I downloaded a bunch to my iPod to listen to again if I need them. They don't just say how to say a phrase but when it's appropriate as well as providing other background.

I still needed to see what these words look like so a simple list like Basic Swedish Phrases provides good backup. This won't enable me to give my presentatino in Swedish, but at least I can be polite when I have to find the toaletten.

I'll be doing an Advanced EF Session, a talk on Silverlight Annotation and on Friday a full day workshop on Entity Framework including some Hands on Labs. It should be a blast.

And even with my dreadful lschedule right now, I'd be a fool not to at least poke around Stockholm so I am flying home on Sunday (6am flight -uggh) and will have Saturday off to be a tourist.