In my blog, I write as though I am just talking and the words me, myself and I appear quite a lot.

When writing technical articles, my editors constantly have to battle the "me myself and I" becuase the article is not supposed to be a story about me. Though I really do like to share those "man, this thing was killing me until I figured out x y and z" type of anecdotal lessons.

As I am writing my book, I have been extremely careful to make the book be about YOU, the reader. Even though I desparatley want to hold your hand and lead the way, I try to be consistent with YOU and even avoid WE as in "and now we're going to do this". It takes a lot of thought to figure out how to do this without being completely impersonal because that would just not be me.

Occasionally I have written essays for CoDe Magazine's MVP Corner and I have an upcoming "End Bracket" essay in MSDN Magazine. These essays are where I get to write about me, myself and I as much as I want. Yay.

I just happened to come across a comment on a recent MVP Corner essay called Meeting Bill Gates. The comment said "Because it's natural, I had a feeling like Julia Lerman talks face to face with me. Nice"

I just love that comment because this is the way I truly love to write.

I used to live in NY State's Hudson Valley and am always interested in what's going on there with the software community.

Some folks I know are beginning to plan for a summit to bring together software people from around the region.

They have a website with a survey (on the registration page) to help with planning the summit.

Hudson Valley Software Summit

Here is a copy of the overview on the home page:

The goal of the Hudson Valley Software Summit (HVSS) is to encourage technological innovation in the region. The area is richly endowed with creative people, many of them software developers and entrepreneurs.

The HVSS is an opportunity for these folks to network with each other and to showcase their work for others outside the immediate community, such as potentially interested parties in New York City, Northern New Jersey, Albany, and Boston.Those for whom this event is a must attend occasion include:

• Venture capital firms
• Technology firms
• Internet service providers
• Private equity firms
• VC-backed portfolio companies
• Angel investors
• Professional service providers

Who work in the fields of:

• Biotechnology
• Communications
• Computers
• Internet
• Medical
• Peripherals
• Semiconductors
• Semiconductor equipment
• Software

The MSDN forums for data access have been restructured a little.

Entity Framework & LINQ to Entities questions:

The one which has always been under "MSDN Forums » Visual Studio 2008 (Pre-release) » ADO.NET (Pre-release)" has been renamed to MSDN Forums » Visual Studio 2008 (Pre-release) » ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ to Entities (Pre-release). It's still pre-release, of course.

LINQ (Released)

While there is still a general LINQ forum under MSDN Forums » Visual Studio 2008 (Pre-release) » LINQ Project General  (Yes, under Pre-Release. I imagine they don't want to lose the content or confuse people by moving the forum), the LINQ "flavors" have now been split up and are in the "Data Platform Development" section.

MSDN Forums » Data Platform Development » LINQ to SQL  
MSDN Forums » Data Platform Development » ADO.NET DataSet (This includes LINQ to DataSet)
MSDN Forums » Data Platform Development » XML and the .NET Framework   (This includes LINQ to XML)
 
Regular ADO.NET (aka "Classic")

1) The above linked ADO.NET DataSet forum is the place to go for all things DataSet.
2) MSDN Forums » Data Platform Development » ADO.NET Data Providers  
"Data platform development using classic ADO.NET (v 1.1 and 2.0) and System.Data namespace."

EFExtensions , released on CodeGallery earlier this week by EF team member, Colin Meek, has a lot of brainy goo in it. So far I've looked at the pieces that Colin has explained in his first post (first post ever) about the Extensions. While most of the extensions in the first part of his post are replicating what Object Services does, the last chunk displays the real benefit of having them at hand.

EF Function Imports can handle READ stored procedures that return existing entity sets. At first I was looking at the extensions to see if they can return random objects, but I haven't seen that yet however there's a lot to look at still. (I'm picturing a generic method that reads the columns and creates an anonymous type on the fly rather than having to go through all of the mucking with the model to make this work. Of course, this is for read-only results.)

What Colin's post shows, however is sprocs that return shaped results. A standard function import can't do this...it needs to map to a single entity type.

So by combining a few of his extensions, he is able to extract the different types from the shaped results and mimic the object materialization that happens under the covers in expected scenarios. Additionally, he is able to add these entities manually into the change tracker.

It's pretty sweet and what's funny to me is that I was trying to do something very similar to this on the same day that Colin released the extensions. I had seen them pop into Code Gallery, made a mental note and a quick blog post without digging into them yet, then a few hours later asked on the forums, "Any way to grab sets of (unrelated) entities in one database call? ". Small world, eh? Now that I have a better understanding of some of the extensions, I will have to go back and see if this does the trick.

Yep... no life.

Except for a few hours out to ski in the woods on Tuesday, I have literally been working from after breakfast to bedtime every day. I have basically been on this new schedule for a few months now and it is really unusual for me to be so focused.

Everyone warned me it would be like this.

It gets to the point where you just can't invent time and don't know what else to do but keep working until you just can't any more. One thing I won't do (and am not physically capable of doing) is cut back on my sleep.

I am definitely impressed that I can focus this well and be so driven. I just wish the pages would churn out more quickly.

When Michele Leroux Bustamante was writing Learning WCF, she told me that she felt she learned WCF at a depth which she never would have achieved if it hadn't been for the "exercise" of writing the book. I totally understand this now. Before I started, there were things that I knew well about Entity Framework, things that I had heard of but hadn't played with yet, things that I kinda knew but not really and obviously lots of things that I had no clue at all about.

So the first item in that list is easy to write about. Everything else is belaboured as I cannot bear to write a sentence unless I'm 150% sure of its accuracy.

I have had (rare) days where I wrote 20+ pages. On the other hand there have also been days (thankfully these are also rare) on which, if it weren't for screen shots, I managed to produce only 4 pages over the course of 12  hours. I have spent so much time turning over every stone, every pebble and every grain of sand in between.

It is definitely an amazing process.

The strangest and most unexpected thing is that I have actually lost weight because I'm not lingering in the kitchen or running upstairs for snacks. Or for that matter going to the store. Rich is away for a few days and the fridge is running low. I just eat what I can find and get back to work. If nothing else, I can always be grateful for losing a few pounds. Good thing I started out with plenty of extra.

And like they say about the Army, it's not a job (at least not a paying one), it's an adventure.

Is Entity Framework right for your Applications? You'll probably want to answer this question before you start digging in deeply to learn this new data access platform that will be released very soon. Does it fit into my architecture? Will my DBA allow it? How will it play with my existing solutions? This BOF is intended as an interactive discussion where there will be plenty of experts in the room to get you started with some important decision making.

It won't happen unless it gets voted for so go vote!

About 3 years ago I moderated a session at PDC (or was it TechEd, I can't even remember ) called Going Solo. The room was literally overflowing into the hallway and it was a great discussion. Steve Smith and I are hoping to host a repeat at TechEd this year but we can't do it unless you vote for it.

Going Solo
Have you ever thought of going independent? This session aims to bring together independent developers with those who have toyed with the idea to share advice, lessons learned and more.

VOTE HERE!

Roger Jennings wrote a dizzying (in a good way) post about stored procedures that I have not even had the chance to absorb yet but it's about creating database procedures after the fact that can be easily used with the entities and associations defined in your model.

Coincidentally, Noam Ben-Ami wrote a lengthy post on teh ADO.NET Team blog about using the designer to leverage DML stored procedures that already map directly to entities defined in teh CSDL, while the stored procedures might do perform additional functions, such as time-stamp checking. Stored Procedure Mapping

...then this piece, Screams, in the current New Yorker is for you. Be a fly on the wall when a bunch of old Jewish comedians gather to celebrate a book of their caricatures..

The Milton Berle Room at the Friars Club was the scene the other day of a party for Drew Friedman’s “More Old Jewish Comedians,” a sequel to “Old Jewish Comedians,” collected caricatures of such revered icons, now gone, as Myron Cohen, Groucho, Buddy Hackett, Burns, Benny, et al., along with Friars present and still carrying on. [more...]

Warning Label: Reading this article while consuming liquids may cause said liquids to eject from your nostrils.

In the EF forums, Danny Simmons lets an EF RTM cat out of the bag.

And, this looks like it has the possibility to be bigger than just for EF. The EF team worked with the WCF team to make ENTIRE GRAPHS serializable, and in an interoperable way. If you look at Ruurd Boeke's blog post,Circular references with WCF: solved a different way, about how he  achieved this, you can see examples of how WCF serialized entities before (non-interoperable) and after his own tweaks. Ruurd has been thinking about this problem for a long time, not just for EF, but for WCF in general, because it's the way that WCF serializes that causes the problem.

So the question is, did they just implement this specifically for EF, or will this have a broader impact? We'll see when the next CTP (as per Danny's comment, he says CTP not Beta4) of EF comes out.

About three years ago, I noticed when perusing the speaker list for TechEd US (which is sorted alphabetically by first name) that there were a lot of Brians. Then I started counting and realized that there were more men named Brian speaking than there were women speaking.

I couldn't help but notice on this year's TechEd Developer speaker slate that there were only five Brians. Heck off the top of my head I can list more than 5 women.

1. Me
2. Kate Gregory
3. Amanda Silver
4. Sara Ford
5. Lisa Feigenbaum
6. Mary Chipman (SQL Server team)

There are more but I don't know them off the top of my head.

It's great to see Colin Meek finally blogging. Colin has been a wealth of information on the MSDN Forums for Entity Fraemwrok related questions. It is also COlin who posted teh Entity Framework Extensions on CodeGallery a few days ago.

Colin talks about the extension in his first post and how they can be used to handle a variety of Stored Procedure scenarios in Entity Framework.

For what looks like a pretty complete list of the blogs of the Entity Framework team and others on the Data Programmability team at Microsoft, see the Resources page of the DataDeveloper.NET website.

Thanks to Alex for the heads' up....

Because of a bug in the way the schema files are created, the behavior for embedding the model into your assembly and the impact on using that assembly in other projects is a little funky. This will change with the next iteration of the EF that we will see as it has been fixed.

In the meantime, there are two things to keep in mind.

1) When you compile, even if you want the files embedded, choose the Copy to Output Directory option for Metadata Artifact Processing, then build, then change the option to Embed in Output Assembly.

2) If you make a change to the model and rebuild, after it is already being referenced by another project, you may or may not get the changes reflected in the assembly and therefore the client project will still fail. In most cases, doing the 2-step build will do the trick. In other cases, it is necessary to go into the bin directory of the model's project and delete all of the schema files (csdl, msl & ssdl) or just delete every thing in there, then do the two step rebuild again.

As I've been working on samples over and over and over, and adjusting my model, I've gotten into the habit of doing this.

One easy red-flag that you need to do this is if you get an error message complaining about C-side vs. O-side. That means that something in the CSDL is different than the classes (O=Objects) that were codegen'd. So you while the assembly does have the updated classes, it doesn't have the updated model.

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This position involves working with the Technology Solutions Practice, supporting the firm’s software and analysis needs. The primary focus will be developing fully dynamic web-based solutions from interface to business logic to back end database design. Managing clients’ expectations throughout the project lifecycle is a key responsibility.  We are looking for someone who is organized, analytical, and experienced in delivering best practice solutions to join our team.

·         Minimum bachelor’s degree with emphasis in computer science or a related field

·         Minimum 3 years experience working on large client projects.

·         Demonstrated software development, programming, design and technical presentation skills.

·         Outstanding written and oral communication skills.

·         Practical experience in the following areas:

o    Web Development in HTML and CSS

o    Database programming in SQL

o    Modern object-oriented programming (e.g. C#, VB.Net, Java)

Please send resume and cover letter to Recruiting Director at employment@rsginc.com and indicate Senior Associate Software Development in the subject heading.

Recognized as one of the “Best Places to Work in Vermont” and recipient of the 2007 Dean C. Davis Outstanding Business Award, RSG employees enjoy excellent benefits, flexible hours and opportunities for advancement.

We are an equal-opportunity/affirmative action employer.

Please visit www.rsginc.com for more information on Resource Systems Group.

Cool - two in one day!

Another goody on the ADO.NET Entity Framework & LINQ to Relational Data Code Gallery page ...

Entity Framework Extensions Library. I'll subtitle this as "stuff we couldn't get into v1, but know you need"!

The first one today was a tool to help you visualize what different types of mapping in an EDM do and what their schema looks like - EF Mapping Helper.

from KIDSvt.com

Are you an ASP.NET / SQL Server Developer?  Are you looking for more clients?

There's a new very cool tool on MSDN Code Gallery from the EF Team called EF Mapping Helper.

What it does is allow you to select various mapping scenarios (eg. TPH Inheritance) and the helper will display a visual image of what the mapping does and the actual XML of the CSDL, SSDL and MSL so you can see what it looks like in the actual schema.

You can combine the mapping types to see how they all look together as well.

This is a huge benefit because sometimes it's just hard to set these things up, therefore how can you see the impact. It's a really great way to look at this - if you are not afraid to look at XML. (Since the visual designer can't do everything, it's useful (to say the least) to know how to work in the XML.)

It will also give ideas of some of the cool things you can do with mapping in an EDM that you may not have thought about. EDM's highest power is in it's ability to really shape your conceptual layer in ways that you can't do with traditional ORMs. But learning all of the different ways to customize a model can be daunting. So I'm really happy to see this tool!

Here's a view of a TPH mapping (click on image for full size)

and a view of a model that contains a TPH and TPC (table per concrete type). It's quite dizzying, so I'd recommend looking at individual mapping scenarios first.

Bill McCarthy pointed out something I hadn't noticed before.

On the VSExpress product highlights page, it kinda rubs it in our noses.

On the other hand, to the right of the images, VB & C# are treated equally

Bill is a devout champion of VB when it comes to how Microsoft itself, positions the language.

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 Qu