A local columnist went through some archives of the paper he writes for and collected a history of shocking gas prices as they were reported over the years by the paper. It's a fun read.

Just to be clear, I wasn't old enough to drive when gas was 49cents/gallon.

I left DevConnections for the Orlando airport and when I got there had another hour and a half before my flight, so headed to the Red Carpet Club. I walk in and as I go to sit down I see Dr. Neil. As I got closer to where he was sitting, there was Michele Leroux Bustamante and Mark Miller. A half hour later, in comes Tim Huckaby. So we're all here with our laptops open, chatting and dare I say - gossiping. If you call talking about how cute someone's baby is "gossip", then I guess that would be the case.

I've been in Orlando at DevConnections for the past few days. I've been a little under the weather which has made it a little rough around the edges for me, but I'm surviving. While it was a bit of a challenge to present a full day workshop with a nasty chestcold, this was nothign compared to Kathleen Dollard who gave a Workflow workshop in the room next door with bronchitis. She knew she was sick but didn't know how sick until I dragged her to a clinic that night and discovered she had a high temperature and bronchitis. Poor thing. She's surviving and did talks today and has more tomorrow.

I met a young programmer named Scott Pio at the attendee party tonight who has been writing some great blog posts about being at DevConnections  on http://spoiledtechie.com/ -- the experience as well as the sessions he has attended. It's so fun to meet young developers who are just so ready to burst with their excitement about technology. It's his first conference and I think the first time he's been somewhere where the term "geek" is actually a complement! Definitely check out his blog and especially his posts about DevConnections!

Hip hip hooray.

My only trip so far in 2008 was on USAirways, so I hadn't realized this until just now as I'm stuck in Dulles for 3 hours because  - oh shock! - my flight from Burlington was delayed and I missed my connection by minutes. As we landed, I saw my plane to Orlando sitting at the gate. I hoofed it down the hallway with my backpack on and my carryon in tow (not great fun in Teva's), arrived breathless to learn that it had just left. Now why don't they get the fact that I'm on a connecting flight - one of their own - and just pulling into my gate and just wait another 2 minutes?

Anyway, at least I had the nice surprise of the free wireless to go along with teh carrott sticks and packaged bites of cheese they have for us here in the lounge. Oh, how it makes me miss the Lufthansa and Ai Canada lounges with their real food and (even though I don't take advantage) local beer on tap!

While it's very hard to leave Vermont when we are having incredible weather (70 - 80 degree days with blue and sunny skies!) I am on my way to Orlando, FL for DevConnections.

Once again, there is a full track dedicated to Data Access. I'll kick it off with a full day of Entity Framework tomorrow. Monday is Microsoft day and I'm thrilled that there will be talks by Mike Flasko from the Astoria team and from Danny Simmons and Colin Meek of the Entity Frameowrk team.

On Tuesday and Wednesday we'll have two more full days with topics like from LINQ to SQL, Synch Services, ADO.NET Perfomance, Entity Framework, Data Sets and more. And top noch presenters like Dino Esposito, Don Keily, Kathleen Dollard, Cathi Gero and more!

Look for the Data Access track which is listed in both the Visual Studio and ASP Connections conferences.

I'll also be doing a session on Astoria Web Mashups in the ASP Connections conference. I was bummed that the current Astoria bits don't line up with Silverlight 2.0 so I can't do that demo any more, but instead I have put together a cool little demo combining Astoria with Popfly. As far as I know, it's the only implementation out there. The session is in one of the 60 minute slots so I'll just have to talk fast, par usual.

If you're at Connections, say hi!

I was experimenting with creating data services from IQueryables. Rather than use the canonical example of creating a set of 3 person objects on the fly and exposing them, I decided to create a service for my application log. (Not something I plan to expose to the web, just a learning tool ).

I created a wrapper class for the System.Diagnostics.EventLogEntry class because I needed to have an ID field that could be read. Thanks to Jonathan Carter's blog post, I knew that there was no property of the real class that would work, so I needed to create my own class with a valid field for a discoverable identity property.

Having done this, I tested my service which worked just fine:

Since I knew there are  a LOT of entries in my application log file (I don't have a sysadmin to do that maintenance for me) I thought it would be smart to filter the entries by adding /LogEntries?$top=10 to the URI. I wasn't sure how Vista would handle that and wasn't shocked to see in the debugger that the filtering was going to be left up to the dataservice:

It's definitely a huge advantage to be able to expose (or interact with) any IQueryable through Astoria, but don't forget that it's the database that has the query processor. In this case, I was returning 23,000 items to my service to be processed.

If I do the same filter to a service that exposed a database via an Entity Data Model, for example Northwind

http://localhost:55176/DataServices/NWDataService.svc/Categories?$top=10

the query is processed by the Entity Frawework and the filter is part of query sent to the database:

SELECT TOP (10)
[Extent1].[CategoryID] AS [CategoryID],
[Extent1].[CategoryName] AS [CategoryName],
[Extent1].[Description] AS [Description],
[Extent1].[Picture] AS [Picture]
FROM [dbo].[Categories] AS [Extent1]
ORDER BY [Extent1].[CategoryID] ASC

Only 10 items are returned for the service to process.

LINQ to SQL will do the same ... i.e. create a filter query that gets sent to the database.

Yes exposing my entire un-maintained application event log is not a real-life scenario and in a real network, I might even use the nice filters that Vista provides for event logs.

But the point is just to pay attention to what you may be asking your service to do.

Adding to the extensive Training Kit ofr Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft has recently released a set of Hands on Labs that are part of a training kit for the .NET 3.5 Extensions that is still in production. Read more...

[A New DevLife Post]

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...

=====

"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.

=====

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]