How did they go from version 1.0 of Entity Framework directly to 4.0?

Anyway, here is a nice overview of the new model first story that Microsoft has baked into the new EF in Visual Studio 2010.

After having watched this I have upgraded my impression of EF from “Complete Garbage” to “Not Entirely Horrifying”.

The RAD editor gives me pause as that is a sure sign of generating garbage behind the scenes. Is it human readable/modifiable?

The original EDMX format was incredibly brittle and very anti-source control system friendly. Have they made improvements to that?

I’ll have to play with it this weekend and see what it is like to actually build a simple app with it.

It is nice to see that MS is listening and at least attempting to play catch up with nHibernate. Would be interesting to do a feature by feature comparison between the two.

Work on the Olympia Software Craftsmanship Workshop is coming along nicely. We announced the workshop on May 5th and have 20 people signed up already. If you are interested in attending, secure your seat ASAP. Only 15 seats left.

So what progress has been made on the materials? The amazing Trevor has been working hard on our customer personae. Not only has he created a great set of user stories, for our fake customer but he has also gone off and created a whole online presence as well. If you are planning to attend, be sure to get familiar with our customer, the more we understand their business the better crafted our solution will be.

Our workshop is focused on taking an existing application and applying principals and techniques of quality software development to make the application more maintainable and easier to add new functionality to.

This requires that we have an existing application. So this last weekend I began working on version 1 of SUFORS, the State UFO Reporting System. Version 1 of SUFORS is intended to be built using the MSDN recommended style of development. So I have attempted to lean on Visual Studio to do most of the heavy lifting for me.

For example, lets examine the Citizen Detail page. In this page I have used the Visual Studio designer to create and configure three SqlDataSources that feed data to a GridView, DataList and DetailsView. The SqlDataSources use a set of CRUD stored procedures to interact with the database. Combined this gives us a nicely crafted page consisting of the Citizen's personal information, a list of any internal "Concern" flags and a tabular view of all the Reports submitted by that Citizen.

The page also has some preconfigured actions. The table of reports obviously links off to a Report Detail page. The menu content area is populated with options to Edit the current Citizen, Add a new Report or simply Cancel out of this page and return form where ever you came from.

So as you can see SUFORS is not your average, sample application. It will be fully functional. It would be awesome of all the attendees would download the current version and become familiar with it. Also keep your eyes on the source control repository for updates as we add new features over the next couple weeks.

The other members of the team (Chris, Justin, Jeff, Robin, Anne & Shanah) are planning to meet at this weekends ALT.NET Seattle meeting to work out some more details. I'll post again afterwards to keep you up to date on any new material or changes.

Looking forward to seeing you all there and having a great time at the workshop.

A few friends and I from ALT.NET Seattle are putting on a software workshop right here in Olympia. Chris did a great job of describing it, so I will quote him:

Some of us folks from ALT.NET Seattle have been working on putting together a workshop for developers in Olympia, WA, focusing on Software Craftsmanship – which, to us, means caring about our craft and applying the principles we know work to what we are doing. The workshop is inspired by some of the discussions started in the much despised, “Why So Mean” session at the recent Seattle ALT.NET conference, as well as discussions in the follow up (and less controversial) “ALT.NET Pedagogy” session, as well as what @briandonahue has been doing in Philadelphia with the “Foundation Series.”

I am hoping this will raise the bar a little bit and get more people walking the walk. My view has always been that we all have to work together, so better to get everyone up to speed on what’s working and what’s not, and for as many people to be passionate and excited about the work they are doing as possible.

And here is the official announcement:

You’re at work and you catch yourself writing another 100 line method that you can’t test and really can’t even understand. You scour the Internet for ideas but there are so many ideas. Some say don’t test, others says don’t test anything, still others say test every keystroke! You just let your head drop to your desk with a solid thud. You think to yourself, “Is this really the best I can do?”

The Olympia Software Craftsmanship Workshop is one day workshop, developed with the intention of increasing the level of awareness of practices and skills that can improve our software.

Any developer interested in improving and learning new skills is welcome. If you can bring a laptop, please do. We will provide the software you need. If you can’t bring a laptop, don’t worry, you can pair up with someone who has one.

 

What: Olympia Software Craftsmanship Workshop

Where: Olympia Center, 222 Columbia St NW, Olympia, WA 98501

When: Saturday June 6, 2009.  10 am to 4 pm

How much does it cost? $25.00 to cover the cost of the facility and lunch. Seating is limited to the first 35 people to both register and submit a payment.

How do I sign up? Go to www.olympiasoftwarecraftsmanship.org

The workshop is hosted by members of the South Sound.NET users group and Alt.Net Seattle who want to help others build better software.

For more information: http://github.com/altnetseattle/olympia_software_craftsmanship_workshop/tree/master