Implementing the Entity Framework

Speaker: John Papa - www.johnpapa.net

A deeper dive than yesterday, more demos, and I'm beginning to get a feeling of what EF could do. When V1 arrives it looks like I'll throw out LLBLGen and go with the EF instead. As I see it it is just another O/R-mapper that has some or all functionality as the competitors.

Was it wrong to choose LLBLGen for the current project? No, absolutely not! The EF is still in CTP and there is not a release date yet and the current project will most certainly be done long before the EF will be released and the CTP is far to unstable to use when developing production code.

Will I continue with LLBLGen, as I have became quiet fond off it during the last weeks, or will I move towards EF? Probably the latter, most of all because it will be a part of VS. It uses the design surface as other parts in VS so all will be familiar.

Well, the Entity Framework just bubbled up as one of the top 3 things to try when arriving at home. The idea for now is to combine LINQ and EF to one educational lunch for my colleagues.

Oh, buy the way, if you get a chance to see John Papa on this topic... take it! I've seen him twice in two days and he really delivered knowledge.

Getting the most out of the Business Data Catalog

Speaker: Todd S. Baginski - www.sharepointblogs.com/tbaginski

The second session for the day with a speaker that I saw yesterday. It's funny how I plan the conference - which sessions to attend depending on the topics and the speakers. No matter how well I read all the abstracts and so on I always end up attending other sessions than I've planned. It actually feels kind of agile, defer decisions as long as possible, in this case until the sessions is about to begin. Well, this session was definitely not in my schedule when I planned this week, but because Todd Baginski performed so well yesterday and Dino Esposito didn't, I took yet another detour to the SharePoint track.

And yet again he delivered a cool, humble session with tons of knowledge flowing from the stage in a steady stream.  

Design Lightweight UI Test Automation in an .NET Environment

Speaker: James McCaffrey

Another thing with conferences is that for certain time slots there are no sessions that look interesting. This was such a time slot, but since I'm here I could as well go to one of the sessions. Yet another thing is that, from time to time, you just stroll along and all of a sudden you find your self sitting on a wonderful session, a gem, totally unplanned.

This session applies to both of the descriptions above, I picked it because the other sessions in this slot looked worse and it turned out to be a very useful lecture. James McCaffrey was a really good speaker, funny and interactive with the audience. He showed several methods of testing an application from the UI, methods that were new to me and even better new ways of looking at UI testing in general. Most useful in the future.

And it's time se check out the MUIA library. I've never heard of it but is apparently a library developed by MS and it is there for testing UI. 

PowerShell for SharePoint Developers

Speaker: Neil Iversen - http://justaddcode.com

I have a recent interest for PowerShell and currently works in a MOSS project, this was obviously a session for me, and I didn't got disappointed. This was an interesting session with a lot of stuff that I couldn't even imagine was possible to do with PowerShell. After the two sessions by Todd Baginski I've been thinking about what we could do with the object model to simplify development, but after this session I throw that away and navigated towards solving that with PowerShell instead.

Q&A Closing Session

This was a rather dull session with silly questions and silly answers and I could have used this time to much better. It would have been better to add regular sessions in this time slot.

Summary of day 3

 Four great sessions and for two of them it was totally unexpected, a lot more on my list of things to try out and learn more about.