As I've been reviewing chapters for my book, one of the things that I have been focused on is the very first sentence of each chapter. Is it alluring enough to make the reader want to read the chapter. I've started referring to it as the "come hither" sentence.

Adam Kinney has shared an astonishing video of a 3D game, a port of Quake for you gamers, that is written from the ground up in Silverlight by a French programmer, Julien Frelat. Read more (and see the video) here...

Thanks to Aaron Seet for the heads up!

[A New DevLife Post]

I just took these pictures outside of my office door!

I thought Bill would appreciate them since I tortured him with summer garden pictures during Australia's winter.

Winter is not here yet in Vermont. This is just a reminder to us that it's coming. The snow will go away and we'll have fall for a while longer.

I just returned from conferences in Amsterdam and Bulgaria where one of the sessions I presented at both conferences was an Intro to Entity Framework.

Entity Framework is a vast topic and I struggle with how to approach a 60 or 75 minute  intro session.

I have contemplated doing a baby-step intro session that just shows a few simple examples - building an Entity Data Model, doing some queries in a Console App, then doing a drag & drop WinForms and a drag & drop (EntityDataSource) web app. But this just never satisfies me.

I also had a long conversation at SDN with Alex Thissen about teaching EF from the top down (EDM, LINQ to Entities, Object Query then EntityClient) or bottom up (EDM, EntityClient, ObjectQuery then LINQ to Entities).

In the end, what I did in Amsterdam (with my session cut short almost 20 minutes because of a problem with the projector cable (which I had actually discovered 15 minutes before the talk was to start so in the end it took about a 1/2 hour to solve the problem :-( ) and in Sofia was to focus first on the EDM, then do some simple querying and then go for wide coverage of what's in the Entity Framework. This approach means less demos, yet the audience can walk away with a good overview of what they can (and can't) expect from the Entity Framework. In Sofia I actually asked the attendees if they would like to just see some drag & drop demos or if they would prefer to get the bigger picture. They overwhelmingly opted for the big picture. And so far, I've seen a few good responses from that, though when I get the evals, I'll know better. In Amsterdam I did get one comment (out of 50+ evals) that said "not enough demos". This pained me, but it was just one. And of course someone who did not know that I was actually in the room testing the equipment 15 minutes before the session began had this complaint ... "test the equipment before the talk, please!"  :-(

This morning, as I'm still catching up on blogs from my 2 weeks away, I saw a post by Dana Coffey about Chris Love's EF presentation at the Richmond Code Camp. Chris is writing a new version of his Beer House Book (providing patterns for architecting ASP.NET applications) which will include Entity Framework and presented a demo from the book.

Dana said

As usual, he really showed enthusiasm for what he was doing and was able to explain it to his audience with clarity and simplicity.  He made me want to do an Entity Framework project simply for fun!

That was an impressive reaction. So I went over to Chris' blog and found this description of the talk:

This presentation will have maybe 4 slides in a slide deck and will be pretty much nothing but rolling up my sleeves and showing how to build an n-Tiered app using the Entity Framework as the Data Access Layer and the Repository Pattern. Be forewarned there will be no EntityDataSource in this presentation!

My goals are to show you how to get up and running using the Entity Framework, a good n-Tiered architecture and a web site. This will just touch the tip of the ice berg and I hope it wets your appetite to look more into the use of the Entity Framework as a data access option.

What a different approach to introducing people to E.F. One good, deep example of it in use. Chris mentions the big problem I worry about - that it's just "the tip of the iceberg". I'm always worried that people will just take what I show them and walk away thinking that's all there is to EF.

The full day workshops that I'm teaching at DevConnections (Nov 10) and DevTeach (Dec 5) will be much easier as I'll have 6 or 7 hours, not 75 minutes. But I do have two user group presentations coming up where I'm doing the intro session again. CapArea.NET in Dec and Philly.NET in January.

Chris' tactic is interesting and I think much more satisfying than a winforms data source or asp.net EntityDataSoure. However what he's doing is very time consuming and won't leave time for much in terms of painting a broad picture of what's in EF.

User groups are a little more flexible about the time so maybe I'll have 90 minutes or even two hours. But I know I will  keep dwelling on this to achieve the perfect balance. While I'd love to get a reaction like Dana's, I think my ultimate goal with my intro talk is not to get people to want to play with EF just for the fun of it, but to be able to decide if EF is a framework they want to incorporate into their architecture and make an investment in.

Camey Combs is trying to choose between a few different titles for her Seattle v4 Code Camp (Nov 15-16) presentation on Entity Framework. I like "What's the EFing Big Deal?" What do you think?

Go vote on Camey's blog or better yet, go to the Seattle Code Camp and attend her session! I personally know that she's getting to know EF pretty darned well!

While I'm away at conferences, that is, while I'm thousands of miles away... my husband has torn apart our house to beef up the poor insulation and put new shingles on the roof. He sent me pictures and it looks like a hurricane blew through!

 

The roof, opened like a can of sardines with all of the old stuff pulled out.

A new layer of some shiny stuff.

More layers of some other stuff. (If these were computer parts, I might be able to identify them.)

The bigger picture of what he's up to and yes, he has promised me that he's tied up with ropes (he used to be a rock climber) so that I won't have to come home to visit him in the hospital! One of the reasons he's doing this while I'm away is that I will be constantly freaked out to see him up on that very high and very steep roof and I probably wouldn't give him a moment's peace because of it.

There are so many women attending DevReach this year that we are going to have an impromptu get together at lunch time tomorrow.

I'm very excited about this and will certainly report back!

I loved reading Beth Granter's blog post (Girl Geeks get their knickers in a twist about cleavage) about the London Girl Geek Dinner that I wrote about here.

Beth is one of the women who cheered the concept of eliminating all lines when it comes to how female we can be within the world of I.T.

Her blog post gives a good flavor and perspective of the discussion earlier this week.

I'll be keeping an eye out for her proposed "Girl Geeks for Cleavage fan club".

Beth also write's about Elizabeth's presentation and one thing that she points out was something I was also impressed with - how Elizabeth responded to a very critical comment.

Today Michael Foord and his wife Delia came into London to do the tourist thing with me.

We wandered over to Buckingham Palace and I took the requisite photo of one of the guards.

 

I loved these fat pelicans (?) in the park near the palace.

After lunch we headed over to the Tate Modern for a special treat but first we got stuck because a film crew was in the area filming a scene for a new Sherlock Holmes movie (we were told it was by Guy Ritchie).

Then a quick peak around the corner revealed St. Paul's Basilica.

To get to the Tate, we had to cross the Millennium Bridge - a great place to stop and take a few pictures.

Here are Michael and Delia with the Tate behind them.

 

and Delia and me with the sun in our eyes and St. Paul's behind.

The special treat at the Tate was a Mark Rothko exhibit! No pictures, though. I love Rothko. In fact I have Rothko paintings as the background on my desktop and laptop computers. So when I realized that this exhibit was happening, it went to the top of my to-do list.

At the end of the day, we met up with Michael's co-worker Jonathan (another Iron Python programmer) , his wife, and some friends of theirs who were visiting from Denmark (another geek - Java & C# programmer) for Fish & Chip at a great little restaurant called the Gilded Hind. What a treat!

Fish & Chips all around.

 

Michael constructed (and actually ate) a chip sandwich (update: it's called a "chip buttie") from bread & butter and chips. Eeew.

 

On to Sofia!

At the Girl Geek Dinner on Thursday night I was surprised to see Peter DeBetta there! He is in London working on a contract and had been told about the GGD by our mutual friend, Rachel Hawley from Red Gate.

I had plans to spend the day with Dave Sussman the next day (now yesterday) and Peter and Dave actually wrote a book together years ago and are pals. But Peter didn't know that Dave was going to make the 1 1/2 hour journey into town.

Dave and I spent the day doing some fun touristy things. Walking through Hyde Park. Seeing the Albert memorial and the Royal Albert Hall.

 

 

We wandered the halls of the Victoria and Albert museum, then over to Big Ben and Trafalgar Square.

At the end of the day we went to Covent Gardens and met up with Peter and two guys from Wintellect who he's working with, Steve and Sergio. Dinner was at a very fun Belgian restaurant called Belgo Centraal. And of course it was very geeky talk about .NET, Silverlight, WCF, EF and more. (even VB6). This was after I got the usual ribbing about being a VB programmer.

 
Sergio, Peter, Dave and Steve.

I'm a whimpy beer drinker so I had a little half pint of Belgian Wheat beer. Here's my beer surrounded by the real beer drinker's glasses!

We all had classic Belgian dinners of steamed mussels and frites. Followed by the yummiest chocolate cheesecake (more like a mousse in fact) that I can ever recall eating.

Today will be more tourism. I discovered that there's a Mark Rothko exhibit at the Tate so I'm going to see that with Michael Foord (co-author of Iron Python in Action) and his wife, Delia. We may even take a ride on the London Eye for a spectacular view of the city.

I have received an email from O'Reilly to let me know that the Rough Cuts version of my book is now online.

 

Currently you will find a handful of the chapters from the early part of the book. These are introductory chapters about the model, querying, stored procs and using EF for databinding in WinForms and WPF apps.

While all of the book chapters are already written, I am cleaning them up. As each chapter gets to that next stage (cleaned up) they will be pushed up to the Rough Cuts. I may not necessarily do them in order so you may see some of the advanced chapters before the rest of the intro chapters are up there.

Links and more info are here:  Entity Framework Book Status

Last night's London GGD event was wild, fun and eye-opening. There were 150 people signed up. I'm not sure how many were in the room.

The event began with a presentation by Elizabeth Kernan about research that she has been doing on gender in the workplace and it's impact on innovation. Their study was broad sweeping in terms of subjects - they worked with teams from over 100 companies in a variety of industries ranging from Volvo to Symantec. The teams were of various sizes up to 30 people on a team and ranged from all women to all men with many ratios in between. So far they have done the quantitative portion of the study which will help them determine where to go with the next stage which will be qualitative through observation. Elizabeth defined for us factors that lead to innovation and showed us statistics about looking for those factors on the different teams. The study found that the teams with the 50/50 balance of men & women were the ones who most prominently displayed the facets that lead to innovation. They didn't spike off the charts, but they were consistently a little higher in each category that was measured. It was really interesting and led to a lot of discussion. She also talked about stereotypes and used as a great example how Nokia made their cell phones pink as a "feature" for women.

After our dinner break (pizza, just like at our user group meetings!) it was time for me to talk about "Defining the -ette in Geekette". I talked a little about my own history and how in the 80's I learned that I needed to cover up my girliness in order to get my geekiness noticed in our industry. But then in the last 5 or 6 years (for me starting with Marcie Jones' DataGridGirl.com website) I realized it was okay to be a girl again (although now that I'm older, the definition is a little different for me) thanks to observing the younger women in our industry who have not been made to feel they need to cover up who they are.

Then I steered from that into ... so if we *do* want to get noticed, what feminine qualities make us stand out in our industry? I showed a cleavage shot that is from someone's conference speaker photo, a beautiful and very smart young woman. It pains me to hear the guys sniggering over that photo. Then I showed a photo of matronly, maternal moi accepting a volunteer of the year award from INETA. This juxtaposition took over much of the rest of the night. We had a spirited , passionate and engaging discussion/debate about where the lines are, if there should be lines and who has the right to determine where they should be drawn. At the same time that we celebrate being able to let our feminine qualities show, is a free-for-all needed/appropriate/professional?  Believe me there were definitely women who thought that this speaker photo was very liberating and that others in the room who were critical of it were being judgmental.

We also spent some time talking about taking advantage of being a minority (and women certainly aren't the most minor monority here) in our industry to open a door or two and the importance of following that up with doing a bang-up job. This too led to debate. The last bit of this talk was about the all important "Street Cred".

It was a rousing evening and not quite what I had planned but I was thrilled to turn it loose when I saw the effect that some of the points I was making was having on the women in the room.

I don't know if I've ever been in a room with 100+  brainy, professional, powerful women talking about our boobs. It was quite amazing.

Last night I participated in the 3rd Amsterdam Girl Geek Dinner and I'm so happy I was able to! The dinner was at a very cool bar called the Flexbar in Amsterdam. About 30 or 35 people showed up. The GGD is run by three women. One of them is Melanie Rieback who is actually an ex-pat American and a Comp Sci professor at a local university. I mean Dr. Melanie Rieback. Melanie just defended her doctorate based on research she has been doing with RFID security. It's really inspiring to be around people like her. She's quite outspoken and had attended a GGD elsewhere and decided to start one in Amsterdam. Everyone was very welcoming. There was a great variety of tech represented there. I was happy to see Danielle Loppe who works on the Expression team at Microsoft's Amsterdam office. I had chatted with Danielle earlier that week at the SDN Conference. There was a pair of women who are well known researchers of the Semantic Web. They were happy to be in a room where they didn't have to explain what that meant. There were a lot of nationalities represented as well including a few other American ex-pats, a gal from New Zealand and others.

I had a lot of fun doing this talk which was aimed at inspiring the women to take advantage of the many learning opportunities out there to enhance their knowledge and/or their career. Melanie offered a lot of tips for getting to conferences.We talked about participating in forums and  a variety of things. Melanie also encouraged me to talk a little bit about the Entity Framework which was interesting to do since I had to do it in a generic enough way that it could be understood by folks who are not necessarily developers or data geeks.

We stayed pretty late. I think I got back to my hotel after midnight.

Then I hd to get up very early to head to London by train and that is where I am now (London, not train).

I just saw that tonight's London Girl Geek dinner (with room for 150) is sold out. It's coincidentally at Microsoft's office. I'll try to report back after the fact. I'll be speaking along with Dr. Elisabeth Kelan, a Sr Research Fellow at the Lehman Center for Women in Business at the London School of economics. How impressive is that?! 

I'm going to do some sightseeing for a few days (in between hiding in my hotel to work on my book edits) and then head to Sofia for DevReach on Sunday morning.

Dave Sussman is hoofing it (okay, taking the train) into London tomorrow and we're going to go wander around the V&A. Saturday is a play day with Python.NET guru Michael Foord and his wife, Delia. Looking forward to it!

Tata.

I haven't been able to go out hiking to see the really phenomenal view but thankfully the view from my house isn't so bad either. I leave for Amsterdam this evening, so I'm putting these photos here to look at while I'm gone and make myself homesick. They are mostly the same picture over and over but some with clouds, some with sun, etc trying to get something that actually captures it.

 

 

How great is that session title?

I'm happy that I don't have a session scheduled at the same time that Alex and Paul are doing this talk during the SDN Conference in Amsterdam next week. If the session is as entertaining as the title, it will be quite a lot of fun to attend! (Of course, it is likely to be in Dutch so I might miss a few good parlays.) Paul's one of the reviewers of my book, so I expect him to be able to go pretty deep into EF's capabilities and provide a good challenge based on what he's learned.

Alex Thissen and Paul Gielens take will compete with two major innovations in the field of data access, namely: the new Entity Data Model - which is part of the ADO.NET Entity Framework - and linQ (Language Integrated Query) to SQL queries to integrate into the programming languages.  What are these technologies, how do they compare to each other, what role they play in Microsoft's Data Access Strategy and when to use what? Of course, there is only one winner!

Although I mentioned this in a blog post last month about the DevTeach early bird special pricing, I thought I would highlight this to see how quickly we could pack the room! Not that the prospect of a full day of EF shouldn't be enticing enough. But I thought that it would be nice to reward like-minded data geeks.

I will be giving away a full VSTS2008 Team Suite MSDN Premium Subscription to attendees of the workshop. That's the one that's $10,000 new and I think about $3000 for a renewal.

Here's more info about the Entity Framework workshop which is on December 5th.

If Montreal doesn't work for you, don't forget that John Papa is doing the same (giving away an MSDN subscription) for his Silverlight class in Florida!  Day of Silverlight 2 and a Free MSDN Premium Subscription. Great minds think alike!

This cost me two very precious hours today, so I thought I would share.

In preparing my laptop for my upcoming trip, I needed to get the latest version of an app I wrote for a client in case I need to do any work for them while I'm away. The application uses the latest version of Crystal Reports which caused me a great deal of grief when I recently moved to it. (See my ASPAlliance article: Lessons Learned: Sorting out Crystal Reports 2008 Versioning, Service Packs and Deployment for details).

Today's time-sucker was not Crystal's fault but the fact that when I installed the earlier version of Crystal on to the laptop, I had done it from an external drive.

When I tried to install the newer version, it chugged along then said that it failed because it couldn't uninstall the previous version.

I attempted to do the uninstall myself from the Control Panel but that failed with this message:

""Error applying transforms. Verify that the specified transform paths are valid"

Some googling pointed out that if I copied the original install files to my hard drive and ran setup from there I could avoid the problem.

That didn't work.

Finally I discovered that within the registry (in Computer\HKey_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products\) there was a folder that contained the Crystal install information. In there was a key called "Transforms" which pointed to F:\Extended\Package\1033.mst. F:\ must have been the path of the external drive when I originally installed the app.

I changed the path of that file to the folder that I had just copied onto my hard drive.

Then I was able to uninstall, not from the Control Panel, but form the setup.exe from that same set of installer files.

Hopefully I'll save somebody the hours and frustration I wasted myself. If you're really grateful, just send chocolate.

As we begin the push of getting my book, Programming Entity Framework, towards production, it is still going to be a number of months before it is out in print. Currently, OReilly is targeting January 2009.

But why wait for paper (and the perfection of the final edits)?

We've decided to take my work in progress and make it available as a Rough Cut  title on OReilly.com and Safari.

The first set of chapters, which are introductory, will appear sometime in the next few days and I'll post the links as soon as I have them.

London Girl Geek Dinners just celebrated their 3rd Anniversary. Since its inception, the idea has taken hold and there are now GGDs all over the world. Read more here!

 

[A New DevLife Post]

The sun just came out so even though I'm trapped working, I ran out the door to snap some pictures. It's been warm so the leaves are turning  a little early. It's going to cool down so that will slow down the process a little.

These are all right from my front yard.

That's our neighbor's cat, Jorgina, who likes to hunt in our field.

Lots of apples in the trees...

...but mostly on the ground.