I’ll be doing a talk on Building Web Apps using LINQ to SQL at VTdotNET on Monday.

I have seen Scott Guthrie do a session on this topic a few times and got so excited I wanted to dig in more and show it off as well. Scott has probably done this talk at least 20 times over the past year, has posted his PPT and demos, writes about it and even has a a recent video webcast on the topic.

He’s a REALLY hard act to follow, but I have tried to stay away from his session as I build my own so that I’m not just trying to do his talk. One of the interesting things about LINQ is that although you can easily group it into things like straight queries, joins, filtering, shaped data, paging and insert/update/deletes and then “advanced :-)”, there are a LOT of ways to do queries. Just like there are a lot of ways to construct a query in any other query language. So in the 90 minutes I have to do my session, I will be giving some specific examples, but more importantly, trying to open up people’s eyes to the power and flexibility of using LINQ to SQL. Then I’ll point them to the 101+ samples as well as the more advanced stuff that people like Fabrice are doing.

I keep worrying that people will say “why do I need to bother coming to your session on this topic when I can just watch THE MASTER do it.” Ummm, free pizza?

But, I trudge on…

Watching the Tenacious Search blog over the past few days, the only name I was familiar with was Werner Vogels, who a few years ago went from researching at Cornell over to Amazon. I know Werner’s a brilliant guy! Even though I am astounded by what I have been reading on the blog (people pointing satellites in the area where Gray was last known to be, the satellite imagery becoming available through the blog, the discussion of what people are doing with teh imagery), I had no idea who the brains behind all of these names were. This NY Times article, published today, enlightened me quite a bit. What has been obvious is that the technology and the minds that Jim Gray has developed, inspired and influenced over the years are all being put into force to help try to locate him.

It’s a dazzling effort, though so far, with heartbreaking results – not a hint of him has been found yet. This isn’t the Bermuda Triangle we’re talking about. How can it be that not one piece of evidence (even if it’s evidence of something tragic) can be found.

You can help, too. Amazon has an app that will display a handful of the satellite images with explanation of what you are looking for. You can go there and look at images and mark them. It’s called Amazon Mechanical Turk.

After checking the various news sources and research.microsoft.com throughout the past few days to see if there’s any new info about Jim Gray, there was an update on the MS Research site, which has a link to this blog where people who are searching (outside of the Coast Guard which has suspended it’s search) for any signs.