All posts by Julie

Off to Vancouver for DevTeach in a few days

Presentations

This will be DevTeach’s first non-Montreal based conference. I’ve never been to Vancouver and am looking forward to seeing it.

As always prior to a multi-day trip, I have a little trepidation.

We’re just getting beautiful snow and I want to ski. My parents (who live 5 hours away in the Binghamton NY area) just had a litter of 17 puppies and could sure use my help. And as always, it’s hard to leave Tasha and Daisy who’s days are quite numbered.

I also believe this is the first conference I’ve attended where summer clothes won’t suffice. I hate having to pack a bag that I can’t carry on, but it might make my life a little easier. But it’s not cold enough for snow at least so I don’t have to bring *that* much.

Here’s the DevTeach website….www.devteach.com

SEVENTEEN Newfoundland Puppies!

Purely Personal

Possibly a record… my parents Newfoundland, Elsa, had 17 puppies on Thanskgiving day. My folks are breeders. They actually have 2 more littlers coming which when all added up could double this number. The pictures of the babies are already on their website . They are cute as cute can be. Newfie puppies weigh about 1 lb each when born and then they just grow and grow and grow!

Blue Heaven Newfoundlands

A little family tree:

The puppies’ mother is Elsa and father is Solomon.

Elsa’s father is Theo. Solomon’s mother is Theo’s sister, Celeste. (So they are cousins, not siblings…this is not scary in the dog world, like it would be in the human world!)

Theo and Celeste came from France, but their mother, Rudy, was a puppy bred by my parents and her father is Packard.

And Packard is the son of my Daisy!

So these puppies are Daisy’s great, great, great grand-puppies! 🙂

Daisy, by the way, will be 13 years old in January. But Tasha’s not impressed, as she will be 14 in two weeks. 13 and 14 are both amazing ages for newfies.

Finally updated the blog to Dasblog 2.0

Blogging

I spent a part of Thanksgiving day updating my blog to 2.0 (written in ASP.NET 2.0). One of the reasons was that my host (ORCS Web) has been having big problems with my blog app (not like I have the kind of traffic that Scott Hanselman gets on his dasblog blog), but still there’s enough and it was eating up server resources.

Rather than upgrading the existing site, I just created a whole new app in a temporary folder and then moved over all of the important pieces – content, images, configuration settings, etc. Once it was ready I had Pam at ORCS Web just change the folder names (not so easy on a running IIS website) and voila, blog now points to the new 2.0 blog.

Already I can tell a HUGE improvement in the speed of things (such as particular administrative tasks). Hopefully the server issues will now go away and they can move my website off of the server that problem sites are relegated to.

Just in time for ASP.NET 3.5! 🙂

Puppies, puppies and more puppies!

Purely Personal

My parents breed Newfoundland dogs. This fall, 3 girls came into heat and they bred all three, just in case. Surprisingly, all three girls got pregnant and the latest x-rays counted a total of 26 puppies in their three big bellies.

You can see the girls, the fathers and lots of pictures of lots of gorgeous newfies on my parents’ website here: Blue Heaven Newfoundlands.

My mom called tonight to say that she was with Elsa (who has at least 10) camped out at a hotel near the vet so that there will be no problems. Rather than take chances, my mom  let’s the vet help (with all of the safety nets nearby) when there’s lots of puppies coming. So probably tomorrow for Elsa and another few weeks for Celeste and Bumper. Very exciting!

Welcome to Alex James, a new PM for Entity Framework

Data Access

As Entity Framework gets deeper and deeper, the responsibility of building and managing what will become Microsoft’s core for data access must get divvied up.

Alex James has recently moved from New Zealand to  join the team as Program Manager for MetaData in entity framework. That does sound narrow, but it’s great that there’s someone focused on that part of the puzzle, rather than the objects, LINQ to ENtities etc.

He’s already written a bunch of posts about things I have been wanting to dig further into, so this is a win win situation as far as I’m concerened.

As his blog is new, it’s easy enough to catch up by starting wtih the first post and read them all.

http://blogs.msdn.com/alexj/default.aspx

A good month to be a developer in Olympia, WA and in different way, in Burlington VT, too

VTdotNetFeed

Camey blogs that they are having a VS2008 install fest (with VS2008 being supplied by Microsoft) at the South Sound .NET User Group in December. I immediately emailed our D.E. asking if we can do that at VTdotNET, but unfortunately, he doesn’t have enough licenses to go around (not his fault) so that leaves out our little teeny tiny itty bitty market. I know he tried to get more, so there’s not much we can do. WHat a gift that would have been for our user group members!

But on a good note, we are getting a full day of the Bob & Chris Roadshow, where we will be tortured and tempted with all of the goodness of VS2008. (grin) SIgn up here! (It’s Thursday, Dec 6, all day at Vermont Tech College in Williston.)

When the official launch happens in late February (and we’ll aim for doing this at our March meeting) hopefully we’ll get a bunch of licenses to give away as we did with the VS2005 launch a few years ago.

Hey Data Geeks! Geek out on ADO.NET at DevConnections again in Spring 2008

Data Access

I’m happy to announce that DevConnections will be hosting a Data Access track again in the Spring 2008 conference (Orlando April 23- 28).

The Data Access track in the recent Las Vegas edition of DevConnections was a great success. Thanks to a dedicated track, there was a Data Access talk happening during every timeslot during the conference. We had 4 Microsoft sessiosn on Microsoft day, nine during the two “3rd party speaker” days and a post-con session.

The room for this track (which had app. 300 seats) was packed for many sessions. The 4 introductory level Entity Framework sessions were practically standing room only and Dino Esposito’s presentation “Typed DataSets, LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities: Data Design Patterns Do Matter” was flowing out of the doorway!

So we think it was a great idea and are doing it again in the spring.

Here’s what we’ve got lined up (which will hit the website in the next week or so):

Pre-Conference workshop:I will be doing a full day pre-con session called “Entity Framework From 0 to 60” which will start with intro and eventually dig way down under the covers for doing advanced work with EF. Entity Framework is due to be released in the first half of next year so if it’s not already out by the time the conference rolls around, it will be darned close, so it will be high time to get ready for this technology!

Day 1: Microsoft will be doing two intermediate/advanced Entity Framework talks, a talk on ADO.NET Data Services and Synchronization Services.

Day 2 & 3: We have a great line up of speakers again: Bill Vaughn, Kathleen Dollard, John Papa, Dino Esposito, Cathi Gero, Dave Sussman, DOn Kiely and myself. THe topics will range from Synchronization SErvices to Performance,  intro & intermediate sessions on Entitity Framework, deep dives into ENtity Framework and LINQ to SQL and more.

So when the snow starts melting, think spring and think DATA! See you in Orlando!