Come to the Tech·Ed Women in Technology (WIT) luncheon and join in the discussion about challenges that women face today—including how to break through the corporate “glass ceiling”—as well as the tools, initiatives, and organizations that support women who work in the IT industry. Please bring your success stories to share with others.

Date: Wednesday, June 4
Time: 11:45am– 2:00pm

While the Women in IT luncheon is a great way for women who are in IT to get together, meet one another, share stories, opinions and lessons, in the past it has not been a way to exclude men from the lunch table. There’s nothing in the description that says “women only”.

Having led BOFs on the topic before and attended this luncheon many times, I know there are many men who have questions about women in IT – whether it’s how to encourage their own daughters, how to enable women in their companies or an interest in the age old question about why the percentage of women in IT is so low. If you are a man in IT and you are interested in attending the luncheon, c’mon along.

Eileen Brown, Manager for the IT Pro Evangelist team in Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Group, is hosting the panel again.

I’ll be on the panel this year along with Meryem Tom, a Director at Microsoft and Deborah Arhelger, COO of JNBridge.

See you there!

What will ADO.NET 3.5 look like with the release of VS2008 & .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1? See if this image makes you think: "Oh, right! Hadn’t thought of it that way!".

[A New DevLife post]

In Beta3 of Entity Framework there was a teaser in the properties window for Entities and their properties. We saw properties for Access, Getter and Setter but they were inactive.

With the latest bits (available in the VS2008 SP1 Beta) those properties have come to life. Here’s what you’ll find and where you’ll find them.

Entity has an Access property that can be set to Internal or Public.

Each property (scalar as well as navigation) has a Getter and Setter that can be Public, Private, Protected or Internal.

EntitySets have a Getter property that can be Public, Private, Protected or Internal. To get to this property, select the EntitySet in the Model Browser.

The settings are dependant on each other. For example if you change an Entity to Internal, but its EntitySet is public , you’ll get this error:

EntityType ‘Customer’ has ‘Internal’ accessibility and EntitySet ‘Customer’ has a get property with ‘Public’ accessibility. EntitySet’s get property must not have less restrictive access than containing EntityType’s access.   

You’ll see the impact of these settings as attributes in the model in the generated class. For example, setting the FirstName property’s Setter to Internal results in the a:SetterAccess attribute added to the Property definition in CSDL.

<Property Name="FirstName" Type="String" Nullable="false" MaxLength="50" a:SetterAccess="Internal" />

and in the Customer class, the FirstName’s Set becomes Friend Set, limiting access to it.

<Global.System.Data.Objects.DataClasses.EdmScalarPropertyAttribute(IsNullable:=false),  _
    Global.System.Runtime.Serialization.DataMemberAttribute()>  _
   Public Property FirstName() As String
       Get
           Return Me._FirstName
       End Get
       Friend Set
           Me.OnFirstNameChanging(value)
           Me.ReportPropertyChanging("FirstName")
           Me._FirstName = Global.System.Data.Objects.DataClasses.StructuralObject.SetValidValue(value, false)
           Me.ReportPropertyChanged("FirstName")
           Me.OnFirstNameChanged
       End Set
   End Property