Oddly, the Tech Ed book store is tucked away among the breakout session rooms this year in Room 405. You have to go looking for it which is different than it being the first thing you see as you walk into the big exhibition hall. It's certainly worth the effort. Even if you don't purchase anything, there...

It felt like ages for the first pile of books to run out but I've been told by O'Reilly they are running low enough at the warehouse that they are going to print another batch of books in a week or so. Tech book sales are bad all over, so even though I was hoping this would happen much sooner (sure,...

I've really been wanting to share the acknowledgements from my book with a wider audience than just the readers of my book (or for that matter, just the readers who happen to even bother reading the Preface. ;)). So, here they are: Where do I begin? I have had great help and support from many people...

The book is already in print and I have a small box of them that I got last week. But still... there's something about Amazon's status that really denotes if the book is live or just memorex. So I was certainly happy to see this a short while ago: Of course Amazon isn't the only place to buy books. ;...

Although the digital version of my book, Programming Entity Framework, is now live on Safari , it seems that the full PDF download is still only that of the Rough Cut that has been online since this fall. If you download the PDF, please compare it to the chapters that are displayed online. The Rough...

I just went to check for new feedback on the Rough Cuts for my book and saw that the feedback is gone and the final version of the book is available. That means that the Rough Cuts readers now have access to the final version of the book as well. Safari subscribers, too. The physical book won't be back...

Congrats to Roger Jennings whose latest book, Professional ADO.NET 3.5 is now listed as "In Stock" on Amazon.com. Hooray! My book, Programming Entity Framework , headed to the printer today and I have been told the hard copies will be ready beginning on Feb. 2nd. Dave Sceppa's book, Programming the Microsoft...

I'm working back and forth with the production editor at O'Reilly to put the final touches on my book. She tells me it heads to the printer next Friday. What ever will I do with myself after next week? ;-) Pre-Order through Amazon Pre-Order through O'Reilly's web site...

Nearly three years ago, I wrote the following blog post: Reason # 4218 why I don't think I'll ever write a book From Chris Sells' blog: Then Mike read all 1300 pages, making sure that the copy editor didn't change the meaning of anything. With the PDFs in hand, we both read the ~1000 pages again (the...

While I was writing my book ( Programming Entity Framework ), I kept track of the page count in a spreadsheet. But I stopped counting a few months ago when the first draft of was nearly done. At that point, I still had to write the intro chapter (chapter 1) and the preface, add most of the C# code and...

I just noticed that 6 more chapters are available on the Rough Cuts site for my book, Programming Entity Framework . Advanced Entity Data Models Implementing Stored Procedures: Beyond the Basics Entities in Web and WCF Services Relationships and Associations Making it Real: Connections, Transactions...

While the entire book is now in production, so far Chapters 2-9 have made it into the RoughCuts version. Here's a full chapter list. THere are still "working titles" on a few of the chapters. 1. Introducing ADO.NET Entity Framework 2. EDM Basics 3. Foundations of Querying 4. More Querying (yes, this...

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....

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...

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...

I forgot about this picture which I took quite a long time ago. After I signed the contract with O'Reilly for my book , they sent me a little packet of information with pointers such as what to do about writer's block, how to work with their templates, etc. Included in that were two classic writing books...

O'Reilly has us .NET authors going to the birds. I've got a Seychelles Blue Pigeon . You can pre-order the book on Amazon.com . Here's a link to my book web site also: www.programmingentityframework.com . John Papa's new cover has a bird as do the other Silverlight titles he displays in his blog post...

Here's a little sidebar from my book that I think is pretty important. Return Results, not Queries from the Business classes While you can get away with binding a query when working directly in the code behind of an ASP.NET page, remember that the query’s job is to be executed and return results. Query...

One of the most tedious steps of writing my book is doing the spell checking when I finish a chapter. While there are certainly plenty of honest to goodness typos, there are a lot of things that pop up on the radar - things like field and property names, class, function and method names, words that are...

I have finally finished what has been, so far, the most difficult chapter of my book. It is a chapter about Relationships and Associations in the Entity Framework. Relationships as a first class citizen in an API is a pretty novel thing for me (and many) and judging from the percentage of questions in...

I have no idea when this went on to Amazon, but it's there now. I STILL don't have a cover which is frustrating. And Amazon seems to have given me some extra time to finish my book! The "about the author" seems funny to me. I guess since, unlike some people , I don't have 80 books under my belt (LINQ...

I just added my latest completed chapter ( Advanced Modelling and Stored Procedures ) into my spreadsheet where I keep track of my progress. When I added the page count (56! - Heck, stored procs deserve their own book anyway) the total added up to exactly 300 pages. I'm getting there but I still have...

It's always funny to google for a solution to a problem and find your own blog post pop up with the answer. I had to use an Entity SQL JOIN query today and I just went back to Chapter 5 to get a reminder of how to construct them. It's not the first time I've taken advantage of what is currently my own...

Boy it's feeling like it. So many nuances when you start looking at inheritance, complex types, query view, definiing queries , many-to-many mappings and then there are stored procedures. I'm wondering if I should just skip all of that in my book and plan to write a book on mapping and another one on...

This week I had to make a very difficult decision. It will make you laugh, but really, it was hard. I had to decide if my book will say "Julie Lerman" or "Julia Lerman". After a LOT of deliberation, I decided to go with my grown up name: Julia Lerman. Which means that any searching on Amazon or whereever...

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...

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...

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...

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...

When I wrote my Intro to ADO.NET Entity Framework article for CoDe Magazine last year, I was told I had to keep it under 5000 words. That was painful. There was so much I left had to leave out that I still thought was part of an intro. I have had to get the hook quite a few times when presenting on EF...

I give in. For years, every time a publisher has asked me "so Julie, when are you going to write a book for us?" I had my answer ready. "I'll do it when you are prepared to give me a $50,000 advance, come to my house weekly to cook dinner and clean the house and also pay for a full year of marriage counseling...