I am very excited about this!!

I will be presenting 2 sessions and a full-day workshop at the Developer Summit 2008 in Stockholm April 9-11.

The workshop is “Entity Framework 0-60”  and the sessions are Entity Framework in the Enterprise and Silverlight Annotation.

Patrik Lowendahl, one of the organizers, tells me that Stockholm is really lovely in the Spring!

It also means I get to see my buddy Christian Weyer and meet Tess Ferrandez (the ASP.NET goddess at Microsoft Support), Jimmy Nillson and a bunch of people I’ve heard about for a long time and not had the chance to meet.

In case you can’t get to Sweden, I”ll be doing the full-day workshop at DevConnections in Orlando in late April.

Roger Jennings pointed out this quote from Dare:

“…even though I’ve been using C# for the past five or six years, I feel like I have to relearn the language from scratch to fully understand or be able to take advantage the LINQ features.”

which lines up with my previous post talking about what it seems to take to learn LINQ well and comparing it to the 10 years I have spent absorbing TSQL.

As per Jaroslaw Kowalski on the EF team:

“We are working with SQL Server CE team to get an updated version of their provider that will be compatible with EF Beta3 out soon. It is a matter of weeks”

source: MSDN forums

Roger Jennings writes about issues with finding examples of complex LINQ to XML queries. Boy have I been there and done that. One of the problems with learning LINQ is that you have two options

1) learn LINQ very deeply so you can do what you need

or

2) learn by example

With LINQ, I tend to start with a need, do what I can until I hit a wall, then look for examples that will help me and use them to learn even more. But it means that there needs to be a LOT of examples.

I have often likened learning LINQ as well as learning Entity SQL to learning T-SQL. Learning T-SQL has, for me, been an evolution which has occurred over some ten years. I still have to look up the Cast & Convert topic 99% of the time in the docs whenever I need to convert a datetime to a desired char format.

Even if there were 1001 examples, I know that there will always be something I want to do that I can’t find an example for and will have to rely on gaining a better understanding of LINQ in order to accomplish it.

Entity Framework easily supports mapping to read stored procedures when the query results match up with an existing entity in the model. If your query results don’t, then you have to create a new read only entity and entity set in the CSDL and a new “fake table” entity and entity set in the SSDL and then you can do the mappings. (I show how to do that in this blog post.)

Chris Snyder found a new twist. What if the result matches an entity, but some of the fields inthe result have been renamed? Unless you wanted to create a read only entity to match it. But then you won’t get the change tracking benefits of a entity with a key.

Jonathan Carter was very interested in Entity Framework and Astoria. Last month, he started working for Microsoft as an Technical Evangelist. So he gets paid to share his excitement about these and other .NET technologies.

Guy Burstein was very interested in Entity Framewrok and Astoria writing lots of posts about the two topics. Today Guy announced that he has started working for Microsoft Israel with the Developer & Platform and Adoption team. He too says he has found the sweet spot of getting paid to do something that you are good at and love.

Congrats!!

I’ve been snooping around the web and found links for many of the db vendors (and 3rd party vendors) to try to watch their own news about what they are doing for Entity Framework.

Here’s Dave Sceppa’s list of companies working on EF providers and interleaved with his list are my best stabs at a blog or page on their website to watch:

And, missing from Dave’s list is Oracle.

I’m watching Christopher Shay’s blog for any news.

No, it’s not what you think I was going to say…

But David Sceppa from the EF team is working on one and it’s on the MSPress website!

Which made me go to amazon and look some more and wouldn’t you know I found a few more…

Not surprised that Roger’s at work on a book!

Perhaps there will be more… only time will tell! 🙂

I have spent a lot of time thinking about Entity Framework in web applications and in SOA and worrying about performance, serialization and concurrency.

But I haven’t spent a lot of time worrying about these things with respect to client apps (winforms and WPF).

In a great thread started by Nick in the forums where he was asking about keeping huge lists around in an application without having to hit the db over and over, both Danny Simmons and I assumed he was talking about web apps and started down the whole serialization/caching path.

But it turned out that Nick was worried about a WPF app which changes everything when you are thinking about performance.

In the end, Danny gave this great guidance (with my highlight):

“The context is safe to keep around as long as you are careful to make sure that it is always used only on a single thread (put it into thread local storage and have one copy for each thread if you need multiple threads).  The connection will open and close automatically as needed so you don’t need to worry about holding a connection open.  Long-running contexts are the expected pattern for rich client apps—just not the right plan for asp.net scenarios and the like where you want the server to be as stateless as possible.”

I wrote a series of Astoria posts based on the preview and have been thinking about updating them for ADO.NET Data Services, but it seems that it would be pretty redundant considering that we have three great resources already doing the same:

Mike Taulty has two posts now in a series: ADO.NET Data Services – Getting Started (2)

Guy Burstein is writing a series:ADO.Net Data Services Part 2 – Using Service Operations with WebGet

Jonathan Carter is writing series: ADO.NET Data Services Part 1: Services

Thanks guys. That means I can go do something else…