Daily Archives: November 18, 2009

Agile Entity Framework 4 talks at NotAtPDC Online today

Data Access

Not at PDC? Well, yeah PDC is having some sessions streamed, like keynotes etc, but for the rest of us, there’s www.notatpdc.com. Two days of live presentations on lots of great topics.

Here’s a screenshot of the schedule so far (note that it is CENTRAL time). Go to the website to get speaker and session details.

image

The abstracts for my two talks are as follows:

Entity Framework v1 made Agile .NET developers very unhappy because it did not support Persistence Ignorance or the ability to create true POCO objects. But the next version has been created with a lot of input from ALT.NET and Domain Driven gurus. If you want to design a model and wire it up to your objects or forget the model completely and have EF infer all that it needs from your objects, you’re covered. Unit Testing? Repositories? You’re still covered.

Part 1: Understand how to create POCOs and how to integrate them into EF. This is what will be covered in Part 1.

Part 2: In this session you’ll see a solution that uses a repository and mocks to enable unit testing with your POCO entities.

Memorial to a tree – yes, a tree

Purely Personal

Five years ago, I wrote this blog post about a tree on our property.

I see this tree all day long while I’m working. This tree is like the ocean. In the summer when it is full green and the wind is blowing, it is absolutely mesmerizing to watch it. I have never loved a tree before, but I love this tree.

Two summers later, I was on the phone during a thunderstorm, with Don Smith from Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices group (who is sure to remember this incident), when lightning struck our house. The next day, I discovered that it had also struck the tree.

Over the next few years, half of the tree was clearly dead. This past summer, the other half succumbed as well. We knew it was a goner but even barren, it was still beautiful. However, it had become a liability because, though the tree was might and strong even when dead, its huge branches were coming down when we had big winds.

So today, Rich finally did the deed and cut the tree down. It’s funny to be sad about a tree. And i will provide a LOT of fuel for us since we are getting a wood stove soon. But still, it was a thing of beauty.

And deserving of one last blog post.