I had a great time chatting with the The 6 Figure Developer podcast hosts this spring. We talked about how I got started, what I actually do for a living, what a Microsoft Director is (and isn’t), how I learn so many things and then of course, geeking out about Entity Framework Core 2! Check it out! Also, yes, I was renewed in the RD program. 😉
I’m so very excited to be heading to Barcelona shortly for TechEd Europe. You may or may not be aware of my dashed hopes last year when I was scheduled to speak at TechEd Europe in Madrid. But when I found myself stuck in the Chicago O’Hare airport on my 2nd day of travel, only to be told I wouldn’t get to Madrid until Thursday afternoon (after 4 days of travel) it was time to turn around and go home. I also had scheduled a post event side trip to Barcelona – this too, I canceled.
I was a little surprised that TechEd was willing to try again considering my bad history but I will be speaking at the 2014 version of the event.
Not only am I looking forward to my first ever trip to Spain and the amazing city of Barcelona, but it will be my first opportunity to meet so many developers that I’ve never met before.
My talk is on Friday, Oct 31 at 12-1:15pm. Yes, on Halloween!
Entity Framework Model Partitioning in Domain-Driven Design Bounded Contexts
Bounded Context is one of the most critical patterns in Domain-Driven Design (DDD). While you shouldn’t have to worry about your data persistence while you are modeling your domain, it is still worrisome to follow DDD patterns not knowing how you’ll get your ORM to fall in line when it’s time to implement the data layer. Entity Framework sample solutions have a long history of creating one huge model to map to one huge database to satisfy all of the needs of your application. In this session we look at patterns using Entity Framework that will support not only multiple bounded contexts in your software but even those areas that are satisfied with pure CRUD logic. You also see patterns to bridge the divides between those bounded contexts when implementing the data persistence with Entity Framework.
Dino Esposito will be doing a relevant talk on Tuesday that will be useful if you are new to Domain-Driven Design.
DEV-B211 Architecting and Implementing Domain-Driven Design Patterns with Microsoft .NET Tuesday, October 28 1:30 PM – 2:45 PM Room: Hall 8.1 Room G
I’d also recommend watching the Domain-Driven Design Fundamentals course that Steve Smith and I created for Pluralsight. It’s about 4 hours long and is a great first look as well as a refresher on some of the key concepts of DDD. You’ll definitely get a lot more out of my talk if you’ve seen this in advance. If you don’t have a subscription to Pluralsight, send me a note and I can get you a 30 day trial code.
Here is my current schedule. This does not list talks I plan to attend, but the opportunities I will have to meet people and geek out! 
So much bling, I just can’t choose!
Steve Smith and I are excited to finally have our Domain-Driven Design Fundamentals course available on Pluralsight (http://juliel.me/PS-DDD ) . It was a long haul creating the course but we wanted it to be just right. And coordinating our schedules became tricky since we really wanted to collaborate completely on this, not just divide up the work and sew it together.
We were also grateful to have Eric Evan’s, the “father” of DDD, participate in the course by letting us interview him and use the resulting video clips where he provides thoughtful and insightful advice throughout the course.
The course has now been out for a few weeks and the reception has been great. Good ratings, great feedback in the discussions and on twitter are making us quite proud of our hard work. And it’s has been in Pluralsight’s Top 10 list (based on past 10 days viewing) in the entire library of some [I believe] 1500 courses since a few days after it was released.
If you don’t have a subscription (but really, they are only $29/month), there is a 10 day free trial on the website and I also have 30 day free trial cards I can share. Let us know what you think!
Steve Smith and I have been working for quite a while on a Domain-Driven Design Fundamentals course for Pluralsight. Our schedules and some interesting, unexpected but quite welcome, learning curves and most importantly, our “go big or go home” desire to refine, clarify and polish everything made this take longer to finish than either of us imagined.
In addition, the demo app that we show and evolve throughout the course – much of which is Steve’s genius – is totally kick-ass!
We are grateful that Eric Evans participated in this by chatting with us on Skype and capturing video to include throughout the course. We also are thankful for some guidance from another DDD guru, Vaughn Vernon.
The course is about 4.5 hours long, broken up into 7 modules.
The course has been done, reviewed, edited and absolutely final…ready to be published but unfortunately, so are many other new courses on Pluralsight. So the DDD Fundamentals is in the queue to get published soon.
Believe me, Steve & I will be tweeting up a storm when this thing finally goes live so watch our blogs or twitter (I’m twitter.com/julielerman, he’s twitter.com/ardalis).
Pluralsight has just released my newest course: Automated Testing for Fraidy Cats Like Me
This is the 43 second introduction to my new course.
Watch the full course: Automated Testing for Fraidy Cats Like Me
It was also the 500th course to be added to their library, so a nice milestone to be associated with!
It’s a story I’ve been wanting to tell for a long time.
The course is only 90 minutes long. It is aimed at developers who have been thinking “I should learn about testing” but have the impression that it’s such a big investment that there’s no point unless you are able to go “all in” so to speak. I was of that mind for a long time. I’m finally benefitting from testing and I still have not gone all-in.
You don’t believe me? As a VB4/5/6 developer my “tests” were either done in the immediate window or just by running the app. I couldn’t test logic until I’d built a UI to execute it.
I have worked with numerous clients where we will build a small method and then the client says “okay let me add some buttons and text boxes to my form to see if that logic works”.
Yep, I’ve been there and done that.
I finally got to an AHA! moment where I saw that automating some of those tests was a huge win for me.
So my goal for the course is to help developers like me (whether you are new to development or have been programming for a long time, like I have) get to that AHA moment. At the same time, I provide a “lay of the land” so to speak. I show a little bit about using some of the most common techniques. I write and run some code (all in Visual Studio and .NET but this should be relevant to developers working with any technology). And I also provide an overview of some of the variety of techniques and tools available.
This is really designed to give developers enough of a look at testing to determine if it’s something they really *do* want to learn and then enough of the basics to allow them – you? – to dive in to the many other learning resources that exist for automated testing.
Watch the full course: Automated Testing for Fraidy Cats Like Me
Need a free Pluralsight trial so you can watch my courses? Send me an email through my contact form.
  |
 KEYNOTE July 12-13 KnoxvilleTN |
| Course | Released | Hrs:Min |
| Entity Framework 4.0 By Example | Aug 2010 | 2:19 |
| Entity Framework and Data Models | Nov 2010 | 1:32 |
| Designer Supported EDM Customization | Jan 2011 | 2:05 |
| Querying the Entity Framework | Feb 2011 | 1:23 |
| Entity Framework 4.1 – Code First | Jun 2011 | 1:59 |
| Entity Framework 4.1 – DbContext | Sep 2011 | 1:21 |
| Data Layer Validation with EF 4.1+ | Feb 2012 | 1:54 |
| Entity Framework Code First Migrations | Mar 2012 | 1:10 |
| Getting Started with Entity Framework 5 | Mar 2013 | 4:23 |
| Entity Framework in the Enterprise | Sep 2012 | 3:16 |
Need a free 30-day trial for Pluralsight to check out my courses? Send me a note on my contact form
There’s still time to register for my post-conference workshop at DevConnections.
VPS301: Entity Framework in the Enterprise: A Day of Guidance for Avoiding and Solving the Big Problems
HANDS-ON, BRING YOUR OWN LAPTOP (9:00 AM – 4:00 PM)
Add’l Fee $425.00
Entity Framework’s default behaviors work wonderfully for demonstration or small applications. But once you start building large applications that will use EF in the data layer, you can quickly run into problems. Most often these are performance problems which can be the result of anything from poor data layer architecture to a simple misunderstanding of how EF works under the covers. EF guru Julie Lerman has been hired by many corporations to help developers and architects discover the causes and then fix underlying problems with how they are implementing Entity Framework. In this one day workshop, we’ll focus on some of the most common problems around architecture, scalability and performance that Julie has encountered while mentoring these development teams. You’ll learn what changes you can make in your apps to fix them as well as how to plan ahead when you are building new apps or moving legacy applications to Entity Framework.
The plan for this workshop is to be very interactive. Bring your problems, your laptops and even some code (that is okay for others to see). If you have a nasty performance issue that we could use to demonstrate getting to the source of the problem and provide suggestions for fixing it, contact Julie through her blog (http://thedatafarm.wpengine.com/blog/contact/) by October 15.
http://devconnections.com/shows/fall2012/workshops.aspx?s=190
Thanks for attending the ONETUG Brown Bag meeting today where I did a quick look at various approaches to working with EF: database/model/code first, working with POCOs and legacy classes and talking about range of using EF in RAD apps to a more architected enterprise app.
You can find my PowerPoint (which I kept losing thanks to not bringing along my Live Meeting manager) at http://www.slideshare.net/JulieLerman/perspectives-on-ef. The slides are a little more of the zen presentation style… not much in the way of bullet points/details. If you are trying to get the meat of the presentation, it won’t be of much use. Sorry.
The application I showed at the end (MVC app with various projects for entities, model, repositories, testing, interfaces) is from Chapter 27 of my book, Programming Entity Framework 2nd Edition. You can find the sample code for that chapter (as well as others) on the downloads page of my book website.
If you watched the presentation, I had a strange problem when I was trying to modify the model to line a property name up with my POCO class. The original name was “Name” and the new name was “RoomName”. There was an error indicating that the model still had “Name” which was not true.
The reason for this was because I was using a solution that I’ve used for a number of demos and it had a phantom DLL in the bin directory with a different version of the model, a version that was still using “Name” for that particular property. EF was most likely finding that embedded model first, hence it’s complaints. Once I deleted all of the bin files and rebuilt, things worked as expected. Cleaning the solution did *not* do the trick. I had to explicitly delete those files. These things only happen when you are presenting live and it’s being recorded for posterity. I have made my monthly sacrifice to the demo gods.
On Monday Sept 27th, Rachel Appel, Steve Bohlen and I presented a full day of Entity Framework presentations at the Entity Framework NYC Firestarter to help developers get started with EF.
The combined slides from our six sessions are on SlideShare.NET at Entity Framework NYC Firestarter (note that there is currently a gap as I await the slides from Session #3).
You can get the demos from my presentations on the downloads page of my book’s website, learnentityframework.com/downloads.
Here are direct links:
Be sure to check the readme.txt files in the downloads.
Watch our blogs, as well as Peter Laudati’s, for the “eventual consistency” scenario where you can find links to all 6 sessions and the slides in one place!