All posts by Julie

An important post from Microsoft about Entity Framework

Mike Pizzo writes a post about Microsoft’s data access strategy that covers a few important things:

1) Announces that EF will not make it into the Orcas release but will ship “A few months after the shipment of Orcas, and within the first half of 2008”. This plan will allow them to give us more than what they would be able to give us in the initial Orcas release.
2) Addresses the LINQ to SQL vs. Entity Framework question, which has been asked quite a lot.

READ MORE HERE

[A New DevLife post]
 

An International Bar Room Brawl of Ideas at DevTeach

Panel on Open Source in the Microsoft Community at DevTeach

www.devteach.com


This year the bonus session (Wednesday May 16 at 18:00) will be a panel of speakers debating the Open Source in the Microsoft Community. This panel discussion takes a look at open source in the Microsoft community from technical, cultural, and business perspectives in a frank discussion with recognizable contributors to and users of open source software for Microsoft platforms. Panelists are: Alan Griver, Oren Eini, Jeremy Miller, Roy Osherove and François Beauregard.

The best part is that Ted Neward will be moderating the panel. There is nothing moderate about Ted Neward though. He will fan the flames for sure. This will be fun.

Telerik’s new Reporting Tool

In their Q1 release, telerik is including the first release of telerik Reporting. With my well-documented, love/hate relationship with Crystal Reports, I was definitely eager to see telerik’s implementation. Telerik is all about simplicity (of use) and design. So this first pass at Reporting has some really great mechanisms for formatting reports in a CSS-like manner, which I really like. Another big win for me over Crystal is that while Crystal has evolved into a .NET tool, telerik’s was designed in .NET. So you can interact with all of the controls in the report in the same manner as any other control in .NET.

Another benefit is the ease of using the reports in a winform or a webform. The only thing I know that is different is that the webforms don’t support multi-column reports.

While there are definitely some more complex things I can achieve in Crystal (and I have the scars to prove it) that I can’t yet do in this first version of telerik Reporting, I expect great things to come of this tool as we see it growing over future releases.

On top of all of this, I’m happy that I can actually copy and paste more than one control at a time.

There’s a lot more to see in there. Check out the download. You can also download the extensive help files.