All posts by Julie

VS2008 Beta2 VPCs will expire November 1st. BACK UP YOUR DATA!

dotNET

From Jeff Beehler on Microsoft’s VSTS team:

We recently discovered that the VPCs we distributed as part of the VS2008 Beta2 release will expire on Thursday, November 1, 2007, much earlier than we had originally expected.  Since the timeout is at the OS level, we cannot automatically extend the timeout period.  As such we are currently in the process of reissuing the VPCs and expect to make them available early next week.

In the meantime, for anyone that has stored information in TFS that they need to access moving forward, we recommend that you immediately backup the TFS databases in preparation to move them to the updated VPCs.  For information to complete these steps, please refer to the documentation on Moving Team Foundation Server.

We’re still working on additional guidance to respond to this situation.  As more information becomes available, I’ll post it here. 

Note this is NOT talking about regular installations but the actual VPCs

Upcoming DevConnections talks: Silverlight Annotation, Ink on the Web, Entity Framework and LINQ

Data Access

The fall DevConnections is coming up in another 10 days (Nov 5-9) in Las vegas.

It looks like they will have about 5,000 attendees again, like last year which is amazing.

I will be doing a variety of talks.

One that i’m especially looking forward to will be teaming up with John Sudds from the Internet Explorer team to present on embedding Ink-Enabled Win Forms controls into ASP.NET 2.0 pages. This will be part of the Microsoft Day session for Mobile Connections. John brings a new level of expertise to the work I have done in this area and solved some problems I was never able to get around. John will be the demo god in this session and i get to do my favorite thing: Talk!

I will also be doing a talk about Annotating with Silverlight as part of the Mobile COnnections show. Don’t let this fool you. Annotating in Silverlight, while best on a tabletpc, also works  nicely on regular pcs and on Macs – anywhere that you can run Silverlight. If you haven’t seen the various test apps that I have deployed on the web, you can check them out here: the Step-by-Step series and the database persistence application.

In the ASPConnections show, I will be doing a session on ASP.NET DataBinding with LINQ which will explore many flavors of LINQ, not just LINQ to SQL.

And then there is the Data Access track in which I will be presenting and advanced talk on Entity Framework – Real World Entity Framework with a focus on multi-tier apps. John Papa will precede this talk with two intro type talks.

Lastly, I will be a presenting a post-conference 1/2 day (9am-12pm) workshop on guidance for accessing data in .NET 3.5. We now have ADO.NET, LINQ to SQL and three ways to query data in Entity Framework. There will be a number of entity framework and LINQ to SQL talks during the main conference, so this session is aimed at comparing and contrasting them and providing guidance on when it makes sense to use each one.

There’s still room to sign up! http://www.devconnections.com   

EF EntityClient for performance

Data Access

Earlier this week, I wrote a post discussing when I would choose querying an data through an Entity Data Model using LINQ to Entities vs. Object services + Entity SQL vs. EntityClient + Entity SQL.

One of the advantages I pointed out about using EntityClient is that it returns datareaders and does not attempt to turn the returned data into objects. In re-reading Zlatko Michailov’s EntityClient post from earlier this year, I realize that I didn’t highlight one of the most important reasons about being able to return datareaders, in case it isn’t obvious: Performance. But note that this is for reading only.

If you do not need the Entity objects materialized by object services and do not need the other benefits of object services (e.g. change tracking and DML) and just want to get your hands on the data, using Entity Client will get it to you the most quickly. While this can also be done with ADO.NET, EntityCLient gives you the benefit of querying the conceptual model rather than directly against the database schema.

Merrill (Rick) Chapman, Author of “In Search of Stupidity” coming to VTSDA in November

VTSDA

I’m on the board of the Vermont Software Developer Alliance and therefore saw the email which came in from Rick Chapman asking if we’d be interested in having him present at one of our monthly meetings.

It was a few days before I realized that this was Merrill Chapman, who wrote (and then revised) the fabulously entertaining and educational “In Search of Stupidity: In Search of Stupidity:
Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters”. Joel Spolsky wrote the forward for the first edition and Eric Sink wrote the forward for the 2nd.

Rick will be presenting at the November 14th VTSDA meeting about his company’s findings from an extensive survey on developments in the SaaS market.