I have posted the slides and demos for two of my three NECC14 talks that I did yesterday (Oct 2nd) on the downloads page of my book’s website at   http://learnentityframework.com/downloads/#conf

You’ll find the demos for Persistence Ignorant Entity Framework 4 and n-Tier ASP.NET Web Forms Apps with Entity Framework. Look in the conference section.

The slides are on SlideShare (www.slideshare.net/julielerman).

I did a third talk (Unit Testing for ‘Fraidy Cats Like Me” but it did not have a powerpoint and is not a talk that generated demos.

I’ve started working on my fall calendar…here’s what’s going on so far.

Cleveland, Ohio, August (okay not quite fall…)

Tuesday August 10: Cleveland .NET SIG (INETA User Group Event) http://www.bennettadelson.com/netsig.aspx

Vermont, September

Saturday Sept 11: Vermont Code Camp 2!  www.vtdotnet.org/codecamp

NYC, September

Monday, Sept 27: Entity Framework Full Day Firestarter, Microsoft Offices, Free. Details & Registration forthcoming…

London, England, October

Thursday Oct 21: I am leaving this day open and would love to do a full day of EF mentoring with *your* company’s dev team. Contact me!

Friday Oct 22: Full Day Hard Core EF 4 Workshop. Probably around £300-£400 for the day. Details & Registration forthcoming…

Saturday Oct 23: Full Day, multi-speaker event at Microsoft including something on intro EF4 by moi. Free! Details & Registration forthcoming…

The Netherlands, October

Mon&Tue, Oct 25 & 26: SDN Conference http://www.sdn.nl/SDN/SDNEvent/SDNConference2010/tabid/162/Default.aspx

Las Vegas, November

Mon-Thurs, Nov 1-4: DevConnections  http://devconnections.com/

Spring has arrived in Vermont, but I’m leaving.

This afternoon I start my overnight journey to Stockholm where I will be participating in the Developer Summit 08 and have been working with Patrik Lowendahl and Mats Rydin who are coordinating. Patrik’s company, Cornerstone is instrumental in this conference and everyone there has been wonderful in helping get me prepared.

I’m really looking forward to it. Stockholm is an incredibily beautiful city with lots of history and I’ve never been there before. Plus there’s a great line up of speakers some who are friends that I always look forward to hanging out with and others who I am looking forward to finally meeting! And David Chappell, who is coming by way of Eilat Israel (a 2 day trip) from TechEd, is giving the keynote!

When I have asked anyone if they want me to bring anything back for them, they all have said "oh, yes, a beautiful Swede!" Well at least my single friends have made that request.

Swedish is not among the languages I ahve ever studied so I was happy to find some really useful lessons on Survival Phrases.com. I downloaded a bunch to my iPod to listen to again if I need them. They don’t just say how to say a phrase but when it’s appropriate as well as providing other background.

I still needed to see what these words look like so a simple list like Basic Swedish Phrases provides good backup. This won’t enable me to give my presentatino in Swedish, but at least I can be polite when I have to find the toaletten.

I’ll be doing an Advanced EF Session, a talk on Silverlight Annotation and on Friday a full day workshop on Entity Framework including some Hands on Labs. It should be a blast.

And even with my dreadful lschedule right now, I’d be a fool not to at least poke around Stockholm so I am flying home on Sunday (6am flight -uggh) and will have Saturday off to be a tourist.

Over the next few months I’ll be presenting at 4 conferences in Stockholm, Orlando, Toronto then again Orlando. I’ll be doing talks on Entity Framework, Astoria, Silverlight and Data Access in general. Details and links are here…

[A New DevLife post]

Although these have been available to conference attendees, I have uploaded the presentations slides from the following sessions to the TALKS page of my website:

• ADO.NET Entity Framework Overview
• Real World Entity Framework (multi-tier issues and patterns)
• ADO.NET 3.5 Data Access Guidance
• Access RESTful DataServices in the Cloud (aka Astoria/ADO.NET DataServices)
• Databinding in ASP.NET with LINQ
• Inking in ASP.NET, AJAX and IE7
• Annotating and Drawing with Ink in Silverlight

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

There’s something about a conference that inadvertantly makes me go dark.

I did 4 sessions and a workshop at DevConnections last week.

In the weeks leading up to to this, I was heads down finalizing my presentations. That includes mucking with the PowerPoint’s and fine-tuning demos and stuffing as much into my brain about the various technologies as I can.

While I was at the conference I spent a lot of my time in my room continuing on this path. The speaker room is a bad place for me to work – too many people I want to talk to! 🙂  I did get to attend a number of Entity Framework and Astoria sessions on Tuesday, but that’s all that I saw in the entire show.

Because I had disparate topics (tablet pc, silverlight, entity framework and LINQ), I needed to really clear my head of the previous topic and wrap my head around the next one.

During this time I did check emails, but I didn’t check my office voice mail, I didn’t do any client work and I managed to write only one blog post. I even got to go out to dinner one night, but most of the rest were working in my room.

(I’m not complaining, by the way, just sharing what it’s like…)

At the end of the week, I went to Colorado for a few days to hang out with my sister & brother in law. I checked email but again, no work, no blogging.

Not only did I not blog, but I wasn’t reading blogs. I had missed the DevCOnnex keynotes and no idea that the VS2008 RTM date was finally announced, that live services came out of beta and more was going on.

I got home Monday afternoon, spent two hours at my house then got back in the car for the VTdotNET user group meeting (another blog I need to write). Since it was the birthday of our illustrious speaker, Russ Fustino, we went out and I got home at about 11:00pm.

Tuesday I finally got to do some client work for the first time in about 3 weeks! I have a huge list of things to do, but topping that list were a host of things one of my client’s has been patiently waiting for.

It still amazes me the impact that conference speaking has on my routine. I am hoping to get my head above water by the end of this week. I also am bummed that I haven’t had any exercise since before I headed to the conference. I had high hopes and brought my swimsuit, sneakers and other related clothes with me, but they never got touched!

So I have LOTS to blog about and so many people awaiting so many things from me. I will just be getting through it all one step at a time…

Okay, I lied. I thought I was staying home all summer, but it turns out that the Greater Lansing User Group had a request in to INETA and it just so happens that their July meeting date falls the same week as the famous Ann Arbor Art Fair that I have always wanted to go to. So, I will be doing an INETA event on Thursday, July 19th in Lansing and as long as I’m going there, I will speak on the previous night at the GANG (Detroit) User Group.

Thanks especially to Bill Wagner and Darrell Hawley for their help in coordinating. Darrell runs the user group in Ann Arbor but their meeting date is weeks before.

I’ll be doing a session on the ADO.NET Entity Framework at both groups.

My Entity Framework presentation at DevTeach was in the last slot of the conference. It was scheduled in the theater which looks like something out of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. Some of the speakers were referring to it as the muppet theater.

About 5 minutes into my presentation, we were informed that there was a snafu with the hotel and they had scheduled a dress-up cocktail party in the theater. So we had to pick up and move to the ballroom on the other end of the conference center. No worries. Except that when we arrived, there was no projector or screen.

So, while the IT guys from DMIB (thank you thank you!!) set up a projector and screen for me, I just stood up and started talking about the Entity Framework for about 10 minutes until I had the use of my slides and demos again.

I wasn’t too phased by this since I could easily sit in a bar with geeks and talk about this stuff for hours with out the aid of a computer. Also I had a VERY great audience of attendees who were totally understanding! Thanks to you, also.

I have posted the demos and a revised Powerpoint for the ADO.NET Entity Framework presentation to the DevTeach site for attendees and to my own website at www.thedatafarm.com/talks.aspx for others. I have run these demos in the March CTP of Orcas.

Yesterday, I presented a session at DevTeach called Hacking ClickOnce. I have lived the web based deployment pain for many years and finally found success with ClickOnce after I worked out some unsupported scenarios with ClickOnce. I wrote about this in an article in CoDe Magazine’s Nov/Dec 2006 issue called Real World ClickOnce. I then decided to turn my lessons into a talk for DevTeach.

At the end of March, I got a new laptop that has Vista on it and have been using it for presenting ever since. Unfortunately, I discovered an unsurmountable problem with one of my hacks when trying to emulate deploying apps via IIS7 (it is locked down much more tightly than IIS6, even when using the “classic .net” app pool) on the Vista machine. But since my hacks work perfectly well in IIS6 and that is still the current web server technology for Windows, I went forward with my presentation; working around the IIS7 issues because the lessons are still totally valid.

It was definitely a little frustrating but hopefully worth the effort. 🙂

I have posted an updated version of the Powerpoint along with the demos onto the DevTeach site for attendees as well as on my TALKS page for others to check out.