Ready For Code Camp!!!

Speakers and sessions have finally been approved and posted on http://www.jaxcodecamp! We are still working on the schedule, however you can look at all the sessions and see which presentations you would like to attend. We have a lot of talent coming to speak from all over. Usually I would say just Florida however this year we have speakers from other states too. Something else that is happening but has not been added to the site yet are the speakers and content that will be happening for Windows Phone 7. Once that track is finalized I will be pushing out the information as well.Jax Code camp is geared for you and this year's code camp is a special one. With the release of VS2010, Blend, Silverlight and other cool Microsoft Technologies this year, each presentation has been selected to help get you ramped up quickly by helping you understand how to use these cool new tools. We have some serious rock stars who consult for a living who will be demonstrating and teaching cutting edge skills, so make sure you are registered for codecamp and stay ahead! To register for codecamp, go to http://www.jaxcodecamp.com/Attendee.aspx/Register

While at Sharepoint Saturday I attended an interesting session titled, "Workflow Visio and SharePoint Designer". I was really amazed that WF had finally found a home in Visio. Visio is a great designer tool for modeling applications through flowcharts and now business users like business analysts and 'subject matter experts' are one step closer to actually being able to design workflows and have them pushed up to Sharepoint. One of WF's greatest features is giving business  professionals the power of designing workflows so that developers do not have to.

 

Tonight is our monthly meeting and all week I have been building Hyper-V machines to serve as the cluster I will be using for my demos. My company, FlowFocus Solutions (http://www.flowfocus.com) will be hosting the meeting with food afterwards at Longhorn. Hope to see ya!

When L2S came out I was fan and have been ever since, however there were some concerns of what was going to happen to it with EF closing in on its heels. As with any technology there is a couple of factors that can help make technology adoption decisions.

1. Meeting a need
2. Support
3. Future

Even though Support and Future can be the same the can also be different as in this case. For example, VB6 is no longer supported however it has no future either! L2S and EF are both supported however what is their future? Obviously, Microsoft has chosen EF as their primary ORM framework because it plays better with other non-Microsoft technologies, but L2S has less of a learning curve when compared to EF which makes it fairly easier when connecting to Sql Server. At this point a decision could be made based on which technology "meets the need", but as a consultant I think it is equally important on understanding how both technologies work and what features can be taken advantage of during development. Here are some of the changes that were added into .Net 4.0.

 Post initiated from this Visual Studio article

 

Just wanted to send out Kudos to Tim McAliley for a great presentation on TFS2010. Tim is a personal friend who recently started sharing his knowledge with others on Sql Server and TFS by presenting at Florida events. Looksing forward to seeing you at the next event Tim!

We finally have our Codecamp site up! If you are interested in speaking please feel free to regsiter at here!

Windows Server AppFabric was released yesterday...Get it here!

Some of the buzz you might have heard around town is the Azure SQL size limitation of 10gb. Well yesterday at TechEd we heard that this will be raised to 50gb. Also announced was that .Net 4.0 Framework support is available which makes things even more interesting:)

Here is a pic of me in the cloud...

This month has been crazy with everything going on. Early this month we held our VS2010 Community Launch here in Jax and had a great turn out, but planning and speaking at those events takes a lot out of ya. As I was creating this blog post I noticed that I had three WF posts that I had started and never finished from April. Well since Brian Knight and I are roadtripping it over to New Orleans, maybe he can drive so I can finish them!

I am so excited about heading to TechEd this year! I was really hoping to speak at it however  I never got an envite. Probably a good thing with everything going on with my career changes. The last conference I have been to was VSLive 2008, when I spoke on WF/WCF integration...Boy have things changed since then. Back then we had to walk up hill 3 miles in the snow, barefooted to integrate the two:) Well while at TechEd, I will make sure to blog/tweet about the cool stuff going on!

Just got back from Orlando's VS2010 Launch and the content was great. Some really cool take aways were...

1. Improvements in data binding with WPF
2. Debug bugs through a visual recording of what a tester did to find a bug using intelliTrace
3. New and improved integration with WSS2010.
   1. installation on Win7.
   2. interface to WCF services and Silverlight.
   3. WF implementation for developing custom workflows
   4. easy debug and deployment of code.

Many thanks to Microsoft for putting on the event. JaxDUG will be hosting our very own VS2010 Launch, May 11, 2010! if you are interested you can register here.