Thanks so much to INETA , Andy Robinson (leader of Bellingham.NET) and Paul Mehner and Camey Combs from South Sound .NET for getting me out to the Seattle area to present at their user groups.
I did a session on LINQ to SQL in Web Apps in Bellingham on Wednesday night after spending 17 hours trying to get there. (Snowstorm in Chicago – more details about that crazy flight here…) I was amazed that people stuck around to wait for me since I didn’t arrive until about 7:45! I did my session from 8 – 10pm and then drove down to Olympia with Paul Mehner who had filled in and did a full workflow session while I was trying to make my way up to Bellingham (what a gorgeous flight!). I was up for 23 straight hours that day and between the adrenaline and my love for presenting, I think I surprised these guys that I was doing this session from what my body clock defined as 11pm – 1am!
The next night I presented at the user group in Olympia. This is the first time I recall a user group meeting that served something other than pizza! Camey had gone to Costco and we had sandwiches, chips, soda and chocolate chip cookies. Mmmmm.
This is the 4th time I’ve taught this session on what’s coming up in ADO.NET in the next Visual studio which translates to Entity Framework and the data access integration with LINQ. It’s all so new to most people and there is so much to show. From explaining the concept and purpose behind the entity model, to inspecting the schema files, laying out the various uses and of course, looking at Object Services, Entity client, Entity SQL and LINQ to Entities. Not to mention LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Datasets. It really is just way too much for one session and frustrating to figure out what to show without leaving out key information. In this session, there was a lot of interest in the actual schema files (and it is really important to take the time to understanding them if you want to really leverage Efs potential) so we spent a good amount of time in that space.
All in all, I think I whetted the appetites and curiosity of most of the folks at the meeting and that is really the best I can hope for in such a short amount of time.
On Friday I drove up to Microsoft (1 hour up, 3 hours back in rush hour traffic!) with my bag filled with Vermont Maple Syrup and goodies from Lake Champlain Chocolates and had some great meetings with some of my buddies on the ADO.NET team as well as the Mobility team (that’s TabletPC and more).
After this, I was actually on a mini vacation! And now I’m in a plane flying east in to what promises to be some pretty nasty storms. We’ll see how that goes….
Update – not quite home yet. When I do get home, I will post the links to the demos and powerpoints.
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