Jean-Rene has started and is announcing that DevTeach will be a twice yearly event.  The next show is in Vancouver Nov 26th to Nov 30th.  JR rocks.  Yesterday he said that he was worried about the number of attendees that he’d have at it.  I think DevTeach Vancouver is going to rock and I’m certainly going to be there.  Venue to be announced after this event.  JR has already told me and it’s going to be a sweet location!

JR is showing the swag that will be drawn after each session.  Sweet…and an Internet cafe (10 laptops courtesy of Technet) to do the evals online.

On to the presentation now with Pablo Castro talking on Bootstraping the Data Platform:  The ADO.NET Entity Framework.  ADO.NET EF is like nHibernate and will save you time writing your data access layer.

One application gets a view of data that is not what will be needed by another application that shares the same data source.  EF will help you to abstract this situation away. 

MS Data Platform:

• provide a uniform way of describing business data
• give each application an appropriate view of the data
• enable the creation of services, from reporting to synchronization to integration
• apps and services use the same data model

EF will enable you to create apps using conceptual models instead of the physical data models.

Demo time.  And we’re starting with creating a Data Source with a wizard.  Sigh.  When will we get past wizard based demos?  Pablo breaks new ground by not using Northwinds.  Instead he has some way to work with Encarta.  This is refreshing.

In memory objects are automatically synchronized with database values for things like identity fields or values updated by database triggers.

You must explicitly tell the framework to load (using a dot Load() syntax) and it will go out to the database and resolve the relationships and load the data appropriately.

Holy crap this guy needs ReSharper to remove all unused references (Ctrl-Alt-F works great for this).

You can edit the XML files through a designer that visualizes the schema.  This can let you change singulars to plurals.  Think of it like the Strong Type Dataset designer.

The room is filled with the sound of Vista starting up.  I have to give MS credit for make a much less intrusive startup sound than the one that was in XP.

This is a database technology

• Database independent

• extended ADO.NET provider model* Broad access-path options

• Update: custom SQL or stored procs

• Retrieval: tables, views, stored procs
• Considering: table-valued functions* Specialized mapping constructs

I think that the MS has done a good job in this proving something that they might not have intended to.  They’ve shown that their design of the ADO.NET framework, using the provider model, has created great extensibility which allows for fantastic new tools to be added on going forward.  Whether this is one of them I’m not sure.