CodeSmith 2011 User Group Tour Update!

The Arkansas leg of the tour went really well. Hey, rest of the US: Arkansas has an amazing .NET community! I don't know what's better, their top notch developers or their gorgeous scenic byways? Either way, I am officially a huge fan of Arkansas. My thanks to everyone who came who out, and a special thanks to all the user group leaders.

Update: We have added a Louisiana leg to the tour!

Calling all Louisiana .NET developers, I will be visiting your city the second week of August! If you live in Shreveport, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, or Lafayette, be sure to come out to your local DNUG and learn about (among other things) code generation!

Dates

• New Mexico
  
  • May 5th (Thursday) - New Mexico - Attack of the Cloud
• Iowa
  
  • May 9th (Monday) - Cedar Rapids - Code Generation
• Texas
  
  • May 11th (Wednesday) - DFW Connected Systems UG - PLINQO: Advanced LINQ to SQL
• Florida
  
  • May 26th (Thursday) - Memphis - Code Generation
  • June 1st (Wednesday) - Brevard County  - PLINQO: Advanced LINQ to SQL
  • June 2nd (Thursday) - Tallahassee - Attack of the Cloud
  • June 7th (Tuesday) - Deerfield Beach - Code Generation
  • June 8th (Wednesday) - Fort Walton Beach - Code Generation
• Alabama
  
  • June 9th (Thursday) - Mobile - Code Generation
• New York
  
  • July 6th (Wednesday) - Fairfield - Code Generation
  • July 7th (Thursday) - Long Island - Code Generation
• Louisiana
  
  • August 8th (Monday) - Shreveport - Attack of the Cloud
  • August 9th (Tuesday) - New Orleans - Code Generation
  • August 10th (Wednesday) - Baton Rouge - Code Generation
  • August 11th (Thursday) - Lafayette - Code Generation

Topics

• Attack, of the Cloud!
  
  • Cloud computing is great, but what do we put in the cloud? The web is advancing at an incredible pace and it’s time to start building true Web Applications, not just web sites! Web Apps shake off the constraints of operating system specific frameworks and free developers to work in an open standards based environment. This session will cover a variety of topics ranging from ASP.NET MVC development, unit testing, REST APIs, JSON, JQuery, ExtJS, tips and tricks, lessons learned, and more. It will conclude with building a sample blog reader Web App, and then deploying that to Windows Azure.
• Generate Your Code!
  
  • Code generation is a powerful practice that allows you produce higher-quality, more consistent code in less time. This helps remove the mundane and repetitive parts of programming, allowing developers to focus their efforts on more important tasks, and saving companies time and money. Code generation enables you to: efficiently reduce repetitive coding, generate code in less time with fewer bugs, and produce consistent code that adheres to your standards.
• Using Embedded QA to Build Rock-Solid Software
  
  • Without an automated means to collect errors from deployed applications, how can you know that your software is performing as expected? Embedded QA can be used to augment your own internal QA efforts, greatly increasing both the effectiveness of your testing and overall stability of your applications. As Jeff Atwood phrased it, "If you're waiting around for users to tell you about problems with your website or application, you're only seeing a tiny fraction of all the problems that are actually occurring. The proverbial tip of the iceberg."
• PLINQO: Advanced LINQ to SQL
  
  • In the time that LINQ to SQL has been available, we have been identifying ways to make LINQ to SQL better. We have compiled all of those cool tips and tricks including new features into a set of CodeSmith templates. PLINQO opens the LINQ TO SQL black box giving you the ability to control your source code while adding many new features and enhancements. It's still LINQ to SQL, but better!

Hope to see you soon!
~ Tom

Two Important Questions about PLINQO EF

The .NET community is the best development community ever.
How do I know that? Because they ask the best questions!

Here are two really important questions that we have been asked concerning PLINQO for Entity Framework that I wanted to call some extra attention to:

What is the advantage of using PLINQO EF instead of standard Entity Framework?

In 1.0 the primary goal was to improve the regeneration story of Entity Framework, thus making it easy to update and sync data and code changes. The entities are pretty much equivalent, but the PLINQO query extensions greatly improve and simplify the composition of queries.

With future versions there will be more features brought in from the PLINQO for L2S feature set.  This will include built in caching, auditing, enhanced serialization, possibly WCF and DataServices support, and hopefully batch/future queries!

What are the benefits, if any, of moving to PLINQO EF over PLINQO L2S?

Such benefits are not there yet, but will be. The primary reason to migrate right now would be to inherit the benefits that standard EF has over L2S, most notably is its multiple database support (so more than just SQL Server).

There will be a simple migration path between the two versions of PLINQO, but the bottom line is that PLINQO EF is not ready for that yet. It is still in beta, and is simply not yet as feature complete as PLINQO L2S. It's going to take one or two releases until we get there, but we will get there! :)