Daily Archives: April 15, 2007

Presenting at Bellingham and Olympia’s South Sound .Net User Groups

Ineta

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.

Code Camp 7 New england wrapup (finally)

Just Rambling

It seems each time I start to write a post about the 7th New England Code Camp (“Deer in the Headlights”)  that was at the beginning of April, something has gotten in the way. But once again, this event was a blast and a great success. I drove down to Boston with Dave Burke and Laura Blood who were subjected to a much longer than expected business call that I had to be on. We also lucked out with the weather. The last time we had a code camp in Boston in march there was a pretty bad snowstorm (poor Dave crashed his car on the way down).

Chris Bowen and Chris Pels pulled off another great weekend. The schedule was packed for two days. Jason Haley, who cam ALL the way cross-country for this (and to visit friends and family) pulled together coffee and donuts for Saturday morning. Since I had to do a session first thing in the morning, Chris Pels knowingly saved a few chocolate glazed donut holes for me. Mmmmmm.

I did two sessions (LINQ to SQL in Web Apps and an Intro to ADO.NET Orcas) and led a chalk talk on the Entity Framework. The chalk talk was amazingly fun to do! We were in a small room but it was packed and we spent most of the time looking at the schema files and talking about the potential of Entity Framework in enterprise apps. I’ve never done a chalk talk before and it was an awesome group discussion.

As always, I love sitting in on Richard Hale Shaw’s talks trying to soak up not only knowledge, but learn from his teaching style as well. Richard starts with his powerpoint decks from his training classes that have something like 200+ slides in them. Then based on where the session is going, he pokes around the deck and pulls up appropriate slides to help demonstrate his points.

Naturally, a bunch of us gathered at the Westin Waltham’s hotel lobby bar Saturday night and I finally had to drag my butt to bed, but it was a blast! I definitely look forward to Number 8 and curious what subtitle will be created for it.

Flying in April to avoid snowstorms? Ummm think again!

Travel

I am currently in Seattle where I did some really fun presentations (thanks INETA) at Bellingham.NET and South Sound .NET (in Olympia) on Wednesday and Thursday. (I’ll write about them in a separate post). I put off travel until April so that I could avoid winter travel problems. That didn’t work out so well.

Flying to Seattle on Wednesday through O’Hare proved to be (as usual) quite a problem as Chicago had a big fat snowstorm. When we landed at O’Hare, we had to wait one and a half hours for gate. Then I got off one plane and onto another. They boarded us (huge plane) and then we sat on the runway for 3 and a half hours before taking off for Seattle! Unfortunately, arriving in Seattle over 5 hours late meant that I was unable to drive the 2+ hours to Bellingham. So I boarded a 6:50 flight to  Bellingham and actually started my presentation at 8pm! (That was 11pm my time.) Luckily, Paul Mehner had driven up and did a fabulous two hour talk on Workflow while they waited for me to arrive. So they got 2 hours of that and then 2  hours of LINQ to SQL. A double header. After this, Paul and I drove (well, Paul drove) the 3 hours south to Olympia where he lives and I stayed overnight at his family’s beautiful house on the Sound.

The next night I did my talk at the Souht Sound User Group and then spent the rest of the time with Camey Combs and her family, visiting the very cool Olympia Farmer’s market and being treated to a fabulous home cooked meal. I’d call it a home away from home except they don’t serve food like that in my house! 🙂

Today is my trip home. I fly from Seattle to Washington D.C. and then take a small flight to Burlington. However, Burlington is expecting a major snowstorm tonight – 100% chance, sleet and snow with 5 – 9 inches expected. So I don’t have high hopes of getting home tonight. I have a great back up plan to stay at Andrew Duthie’s however (MSDN Dev. Evangelist in Washington D.C. area) . (All links coming but I’m typing quickly so I can go board my plane.)

So place your bets. Will I get home tonight? Will the little prop plane fly into a big snowstorm and land in burlington at 11pm? Then will I drive another 1/2 hour in the big snowstorm to my house? We’ll see how it goes.