Monthly Archives: October 2012

Easy Move for Outlook when Replacing Office 2013 Preview with RTM

Tools

I just downloaded Office 2013 Pro Plus from MSDN to install on a machine that was running the preview. As this is a recently repaved computer, Office 2013 Preview was the only version of Office on the box. In prep, I sought out others’ reports on the web, but couldn’t find anything except a note somewhere (not from Microsoft) saying that you had to uninstall the Preview first.

I was hoping not to have to go through account set up, macros and other non PST file settings again and took a bunch of precautions such as backing up the relevant registry node and taking a few screenshots. It turns out that all of these precautions were unnecessary. Yay.

When I opened the new Outlook installation, it already had my accounts with PST files, my Quick Access shortcuts and my macros in place. So in that regard, it was as though I had just reopened the already set up Outlook Preview. I suppose that means that uninstalling the Preview did not remove the registry files with the settings. the only thing I had to reset so far was to make sure the calendar showed up on the To-Do bar.

WRT the settings still being on the computer after uninstalling, I had come across a blog post by a Microsoft MVP about cleaning up after an Office 2013 Preview uninstall which should be useful if you have no intention of replacing that with the RTM.

Other than that I haven’t see anything different in my quick look so far. I did read that you can change the color scheme.

There are two things that I was unhappy about (one much more than the other) with Preview which have not changed with RTM.

When you have the calendar in the To-Do bar it only displays events for the selected date. This is a change from Outlook 2010. I have grown very dependent on seeing upcoming calendar items listed there. I am not very habitual (to go look at the calendar) and I have bad short term memory. So having the next few days or week’s worth of calendar events in my face constantly (because I’m constantly in the email section of Outlook) was a great benefit for me. It would help me keep things in mind..from dentist appointments to client meetings. I a not sure how I will replace this without having to train myself to a new habit.

The only other annoyance so far is that you can’t drag emails onto that ToDo bar calendar to create calendar items from them. This was a realy nice feature. Now you have to go through a lot of steps to duplicate that task.

But it’s the price of moving forward and I’ll just learn to live with these and create new habits. But …arggh..and to other software developers…think about that when you consider removing features when creating new versions of software tools.

Oh and 3rd party Office developers? Call me, maybe?

Full Day Entity Framework Workshop Nov 2 at DevConnections

Presentations

There’s still time to register for my post-conference workshop at DevConnections.

VPS301: Entity Framework in the Enterprise: A Day of Guidance for Avoiding and Solving the Big Problems
HANDS-ON, BRING YOUR OWN LAPTOP (9:00 AM – 4:00 PM)
Add’l Fee $425.00

Entity Framework’s default behaviors work wonderfully for demonstration or small applications. But once you start building large applications that will use EF in the data layer, you can quickly run into problems. Most often these are performance problems which can be the result of anything from poor data layer architecture to a simple misunderstanding of how EF works under the covers. EF guru Julie Lerman has been hired by many corporations to help developers and architects discover the causes and then fix underlying problems with how they are implementing Entity Framework. In this one day workshop, we’ll focus on some of the most common problems around architecture, scalability and performance that Julie has encountered while mentoring these development teams. You’ll learn what changes you can make in your apps to fix them as well as how to plan ahead when you are building new apps or moving legacy applications to Entity Framework.

The plan for this workshop is to be very interactive. Bring your problems, your laptops and even some code (that is okay for others to see). If you have a nasty performance issue that we could use to demonstrate getting to the source of the problem and provide suggestions for fixing it, contact Julie through her blog (http://thedatafarm.wpengine.com/blog/contact/) by October 15.

http://devconnections.com/shows/fall2012/workshops.aspx?s=190

New Entity Framework in the Enterprise Course on Pluralsight

Data Access

Well..new as in published last month but I never blogged about it.

This is a 3hr16 minute course called “Entity Framework in the Enterprise”.

Learn how Entity Framework fits into your overall software solution when using enterprise level architecture. You’ll see how to implement DDD Bounded Contexts with EF, Repository and Unit of Work patterns and a variety of styles of automated testing. This course is applicable to apps built with V2010, EF4.1+ and .NET 4 as well as with VS2012, EF5 and .NET 4.5.

There are four modules.

1) Architecting the Data Layer (Overview)

2) Bounded DbContext

3) Repositories and Unit of Work

4) Automated Testing

Pluralsight put a 10-minute clip of this on YouTube and the blogged about it. The clip focuses on the Domain Driven Design Bounded Context pattern and how I’ll implement it with Entity Framework. Here is that clip.

The full course (which requires a subscription, but a month for $29 that gives you full access to the entire Pluralsight library is pretty cheap!) . Here’s the link to the course.

I now have 9 Entity Framework courses on Pluralsight which is almost 17 hours worth of content.

Enjoy!