the ‘bee log

This is absolutely surreal… What’s next? Software architect plush toys?

Being in the position of doing both a smart client and a web client for our software, it’s good to see we’ll be getting some resources for putting together composite web applications.

CodePlex is the go-to place for the info including a powerpoint deck and a video that gives some context.

Also glad to see this project is going on CodePlex; the community tools are much better than GotDotNet. Namely there’s an RSS feed with the discussion forums. Previously I had to to do an outlook rules/sort hack to keep up with the sheer volume of messages and information.

Thanks to edjez for the tip!

From the ADO.NET team blog: a CTP of the designer software that lets you make conceptual entity models is available for your downloading pleasure.

I blogged a while back about the Microsoft Patterns & Practices collaborative workspace. Here’s the video tour. Cool!

I’m really into the idea of having multiple work venues centered around the team work area. So I could go from my office, to the team hacking space, to the customer room… as the situation changes. Having mission-specific spaces would help maximize productivity and break up the day — encouraging creativity.

Projectors everywhere is nice. It’s a drag to have four people (of varrying visual acuity) sitting around a 20″ or 19″ monitor. Sometimes I just want show-and-tell or sit back, be comfortable, and review the code.

Given that I’m not co-located, oh, 75-80% of the time, I’m interested to see what other people in my situation are doing for remote and/or nomadic collaboration.

Maybe I’ll post on my strategies and wishes for this in the future…

Just confirmed: I’ll be doing the same talk about CAB/SCSF I’m doing at the Syracuse Group (see details here) for the NYC Group. Super excited, should be an awesome time; this is a big group that asks really good questions (just came from a meeting there tonight).

A big thanks to Andrew Brust, Stephen Forte, and Bill Zack for the chance to share the knowledge!

I’ll be giving a presentation to the Syracuse .NET Developer Group entitled “CAB and the Smart Client Software Factory” on November 1st. A big thanks to Andy Beaulieu (Syracuse Group Leader) for the opportunity!

We’ll go over some CAB/SCSF basics, dig into the finer points, talk about some design patterns & decisions… a whole bunch of stuff.

If you’re in the ‘Cuse and available on Nov. 1, why not come out and join the discussion?

I hate doing the echo chamber thing here, but it took me a while to come across this, and I want the Xclaim boys to see it, so I thought I’d post:

http://datajunkies.net/screencasts/adonet_vnext_pa…

A visual tour of what the Entity Framework buys us. Encouraging!

Kind of going off the last post…

So, behind the whole ADO.NET Entities infrastructure they have a standard, declarative model for representing queries, canonical query trees. Sounds crazy-complex, but it’s - at least in concept, I’m sure the implementation was a fun challenge - a simple idea. You can think of it as a query serialization format. The infrastructure has various higher-level representations of these queries.

What’s very, very interesting is the quote from this post on the ADO.NET team blog (where I learned of the above):

At the Object Services layer, you have a choice of expressing queries either via LINQ or via eSQL. At the Map Provider, you need to express queries in terms of eSQL. We may also allow – in a future version – queries to be specified in terms of canonical query trees (CQTs).  

Nice.

Now here’s a right sexy idea… build an expression editor that uses metadata services and spits out CQT. This could be a foundation for user-generated queries (ad-hoc reports, searches) and nice tool for business rule conditions. I like it.