All posts by Julie

I go away for a few days and look what I miss! EF Beta 3 was released!

Data Access

After I left Seattle, rather than going home as I had planned I ended up going to my parent’s house (where I still am) to attend a funeral after which I was whisked up to Canastota NY where my mom was camped out with two pregnant dogs (Celeste and Bumper) near her fabulous vet (Village Vet in Canastota) waiting for the right time to do c-sections and bring the pups into the world. Celeste had 6 beautiful puppies yesterday and I drove them back to Binghamton and am now helping out with her pups as well as the 2 week old litter of 17. Mom and my sister are still in Canastota with Bumper and they will be doing (they = vet, not my mom & sister) doing her c-section today with an expectation of 10 or more puppies.

In the meantime, what did I miss?

We were sent the entire transcript of our conversation with Bill Gates earlier this week. Keith Peters is posting it (in sections) on his blog.

Entity Framework Beta3 and the CTP2 of the tools were released.  (Also, here’s a  list of breaking changes) I’ve only been waiting for this for months and I can’t even look at it right now because I am responsible for precious little lives.

 

 

 

When airline delays are a good thing!

Travel

I’m in Seattle and on my way home to Burlington. When I arrived at the airport, I saw that my flight was delayed but it didn’t indicate for how long.

Shock of shocks … there is snow in Chicago, so my flight through Chicago was potentially delayed. If it was delayed more than 1/2 hour, I would likely miss my connecton to get home – the last one of the night.

Normally, this would have made me unhappy. However, for the past two days, I had been trying to reroute my flight to Binghamton  or Syracuse NY so that I could attend a family funeral but it was going to cost $450 to make the change – with no option to use miles to pay for the difference. I had decided I would just fly home to Vermont, get up at 5am and drive the 5 hours to Syracuse.

But the delay ended up solving the problem for me. United was able to change my flight to go to Binghamton without any charge. This I can’t complain about.

In the end, the Seattle to Chicago flight actually left on time, but I’m very happy that I’ll be able to get to my parent’s house tonight and we’ll just work out the logistics of my getting back to Vermont later.

Maple Syrup for Bill Gates

Just Rambling

So I got back to my hotel room after the meeting and was getting a few things from my backpack and was sorely disappointed to find this:

A bottle of Maple Syrup I had brought with me from Vermont to give to Bill Gates. I had totally forgotten in the excitement of the whole day.

So, I very happily gave it to Tim Harris, from the DPE (Develper Platform Evangelism) team who had coordinated the trip and the day. He was already looking forward to the pancakes he plans to have tomorrow morning.

Our hour with Bill Gates

Just Rambling

Okay that was fun. I was the third one to ask a question and about one minute before my time there were suddenly about 5000 in my head.

Each person asked a question and each question started him off on an interesting road.

There will be a transcript provided so I’m not going to bother trying to share the entire conversation.

When we first sat down, I feared that my pulse was racing, but then it was easy to get absorbed in what he was talking about.

Interesting to me was his discussion of vision – that a lot of the driving force is based on the dream of what computing should be able to achieve someday.

For me, however, the most exciting thing is that with all of the money and power that Bill Gates wields, he continues to change the world through the Gates Foundation.

I managed to suggest that if he ever wanted to open a Gates Foundation office in Vermont, to give me a call…

We had a group photo that we’ll get along with the transcript.

And no, we didn’t get a zune – but I’ve got my Nano.

At Microsoft talking about MIX08 (and a special guest!)

Just Rambling

I was invited by the DPE team (Developer Platform Evanglism) along with 9 other people to attend the Mix n Mash 08 event where the MIX team is picking our brains while they formulate Mix08. Right now we are talking wiht Scott Guthrie about where Microsoft is headed with development tools.

Here is the list of people who are attending:

Kip Kniskern – www.liveside.net

Molly Holzschlag – www.molly.com

Jesse Warden – www.jessewarden.com

Jonathan Snook – www.snook.ca/jonathan

Keith Peters – www.bit-101.com

Kelly Goto – www.gotomobile.com

Erik Natzke – http://jot.eriknatzke.com

Julie Lerman – www.thedatafarm.com/blog

Rob Howard – http://weblogs.asp.net/rhoward

At the end of the day, we get to spend an hour with Bill Gates. I’m definitely excited about this. My husband has ben making a list of everything worng with his computer and his user experience for the past two months with the hope that I will present it to Bill. But, that’s not going to happen.

Last year, attendees came clean with the admission that they had been given the gift of a Zune for attending. This year, as a joking nod to that, we got cookies that were decorated to look like a Zune. Photo later.

Discussions right now are focused on Microsoft in the mobile space. I also asked about the whole firehose problem – of SOOOO many technologies coming at us. The only way to deal with it of course is to ignore most of it and focus on what you are best at – but man that’s is ONE hard bit of guidance to follow.

With my own focus on data access right now, it means that I’ll be able to get you data but might not be able to help you get it on your form.

Watching the weather and air travel patterns

Travel

With the inclement weather all over the U.S. right now and a nasty forecast of snow & sleet for Burlington tomorrow morning, I’ve been watching the weather in Vermont, Chicago and Seattle as well as what’s going on today with flights between those cities. I’m supposed to fly to Seattle tomorrow.

 

One great tool for watching flight patterns between airports is from the FAA’s flight delay information – Air Traffic Control System Command Center website.

 

Another trick is just to go to United or whatever airline you prefer and ask it to show status for all flights between your destinations, rather than a specific flight #. SO I can see that flights between Burlington and Chicago today, some were cancelled, the 12:30pm flight left and arrived on time. The later afternoon flights are seriously delayed (eg 5pm flight delayed until 8pm). So it’s all over the map. Tomorrow morning, my key piece of info will be when the flight FROM Chicago heads to Burlington because that plane turns around and flies back to Chicago which is the flight I’m supposed to be on. Snow & sleet also makes for interesting travel to drive to the airport, much less worrying about planes landing there. But pilots continue to amaze me when they make perfectly normal landings in conditions that have me white knuckled and with a racing pulse. I’ll stick with the day job.

 

DevTeach and DevConnections session PowerPoints uploaded

Presentations

Although these have been available to conference attendees, I have uploaded the presentations slides from the following sessions to the TALKS page of my website:

  • ADO.NET Entity Framework Overview
  • Real World Entity Framework (multi-tier issues and patterns)
  • ADO.NET 3.5 Data Access Guidance
  • Access RESTful DataServices in the Cloud (aka Astoria/ADO.NET DataServices)
  • Databinding in ASP.NET with LINQ
  • Inking in ASP.NET, AJAX and IE7
  • Annotating and Drawing with Ink in Silverlight