Daily Archives: February 12, 2008

From the forums – what’s in the near future for Entity Framework and tools

Data Access

Some of the best info about Entity Framework is buried in the forums.

I wanted to surface a few important things.

1) From Danny Simmons on January 28th responding to a question about RTM, while Danny is forced to repeat yet again “first half of 2008” he drops some great info about another build to play with before then:

“What I can tell you, though, is that there will be another beta/ctp before the final release.  Sadly I don’t have a firm date for that yet either.  We’ll let you know just as soon as we can.”

2) From Noam Ben-Ami, who is the PM for the Tools, in response to a question about creating an EDM and then generating database objects from that:

“Despite our best efforts, this feature does not look like it will make the first release of the designer. We are working on this for a future release. In the meantime, we are looking for a way to release some sample code that will demonstrate this functionality and which you’ll be able to modify for your own needs/database platform.”

I mentioned the second point in my upcoming DotNetRocks interview, though I was having a hard time remembering which feature I had read this news about. My memory, it turns out, did serve me right although I was very hesitant for fear of misspeaking.

It would be great if this information were more readily available (poke poke), which is why I’m blogging it! 🙂

Just recorded DotNetRocks about Entity Framework

Data Access

Earlier today I recorded a DotNetRocks show with Carl and Richard where  I got to go on and on and on about Entity Framework for a whole hour (which flew by in what felt like 10 minutes). Richard’s heavy DBA background made for some really interesting questions.

One issue that really stands out is that a lot of dbas are aware of EF and LINQ to SQL and the fact that they do dynamic query generation. Many of them ,however, do not know that EF and LINQ to SQL can also be wired up to use stored procedures for DML and straight queries as well as views. Because of this, I have even been witness to SQL experts telling DBAs not to let their developers use EF or LINQ to SQL. Pablo Castro had a long talk with Greg Low who is a SQL guru (and MVP and RD and a reallllly nice guy and a very involved community leader that I originally met through INETA many years ago) and asked a lot of these questions on a recent podcast on SQL Down Under.

Clearly the message needs to be spread!

(Unlike the interesting and untrue LINQ to SQL rumor that was spreading this morning.)

The DotNetRocks show will “air” on Feb 26th.

Carl and I also talked about doing a series of EF “sessions” for dnrTV.

VTdotNET’s 6th Anniversary Meeting: Unit Testing, cake and some surprises

VTdotNetFeed


Last night was Vermont.NET’s 6th Anniversary. Our first meeting was Feb 2002 with Russ Fustino starting us off to an unknown future.

So now it’s been 6 years and we have had a meeting almost every single month in those 6 years. More importantly, we have built a great community of developers who have become old friends.

We have a few thank you’s to distribute for last night’s meeting.

First of course, thanks to Sarah Cameron, a VSTS expert who through her company, InCycleSoftware.com, works with clients to handle enormous deployments of and training on VSTS at companies with development teams in the thousands. Now that the Unit Testing feature from VSTS is in the Pro version of VS2008, she came to show us how it works. She is extremely knowledgeable and very impressive in handling the many challenging questions asked throughout the presentation. Sarah drove down from Montreal (a 3 hour drive) so after the meeting, she stayed overnight at our house and I got to spend a bunch of time with her. She wasn’t even daunted by the -7 fahrenheit temperature in the morning. It’s a heat wave compared to Montreal in January!

Thanks, as always to VTC for letting us have our meetings there, even if they understandably have to charge us a nominal fee.

Thanks to CONIX.com for sponsoring this meeting in a big way. They provided the pizza and soda and even the birthday cake. They also paid the room fee. Tom Cooley, a long time VTdotNET member and employee of CONIX went out of his way to not only order, pick up and deliver all of the goodies. but when we realized that we hadn’t co-ordinated on plates and cups, he went back to the pizza joint to pick them up. The sad part of the story is that unbeknownst to me, Tom was not feeling well, so after he dropped off everything, he went home. Isn’t that really sad? 🙁

Thanks also to Goodrich Corp (Vergennes Vermont location) whose long time attendee, Bret Griswold, arrived with a gift for the user group. He presented us with a check to cover the cost of our meeting space for a whole year! This is huge for us and means that I won’t have to go begging for a while to cover that. (We still manage not to have to charge dues.) So thanks to Goodrich. It’s a drop in the bucket for such a big company, but it means a lot to Vermont.NET.

What’s a user group meeting without swag? Thanks to Infragistics and JetBrains for providing licenses to raffle off, to Codezone for some great swag and great MSPress books and to telerik for sending a small pile of my FAVORITE t-shirt in the world so that I could give one to Sarah and a few of the other gals who attended the meeting! Last time I had some of those shirts, they were snagged by many guys to give to their wives/girlfriends/daughters.

And thanks to everyone who continues to be part of the Vermont.NET community. Every speaker who has come to our group from elsewhere has commented on what a friendly and fun group you all are.