Living in the Tech Avalanche Generation

Its no secret that I am fan of LINQ To SQL, this blog gave berth to the LINQ To SQL support bumper sticker and I have recently shouted out my disappointment regarding the back seat that the product seems to be taking to the Entity Framework. In a bid to know more about the Entity Framework I recently consolidated Julie’s series of posts into a single PDF for ease of reading. I have also earmarked Julie’s book to take the learning to the next level and I sincerely hope I am won over by the product. I will from time to time check in with a post to update with my observations and of course will no doubt compare what I find with what I had already grown to love.

You can find the Julie’s original posts below or simply follow the link on the image here and it will take you to the consolidated PDF version of the series of post.

Creating an ADO.NET Entity Framework Entity Data Model

Use an Entity Framework Entity as a WinForms Data Source

Using Stored Procedures for Insert, Update & Delete in an Entity Data Model

ASP.NET DataBinding with LINQ to Entities

WPF Databinding with Entity Framework

Many to Many Relationships in the Entity Data Model

I have recently updated with Silverlight 2.0 and Blend 2.0, I also had to downgrade from the Blend 2.5 preview version as it wont work with the current RTM’s. Last thing I installed was the Express Version of CodeRush (which I really love) and now VS.Net seems to be restarting itself a bit too often for my liking and I am really becoming annoyed with not being able to get the XAML view of some (not all) my Silverlight applications. Bizarro World! Apparently the XAML view problem is a VS.Net bug (something to do with styles in the app.xaml file), however it’s worth noting that I can see everything just fine in Blend. I also have Ruby In Steel installed and I did notice some wacky behaviour around that time as well. I really don’t want to do a rebuild, I will report back soon with whatever my research turns up.

Update: 13th November 2008

I removed the Ruby In Steel plugin for VS.Net and the visual XSD add-in, so far so good (for general stability in VS 2008) however I still don’t get a XAML Preview for a complex project with more than about 12 or so views (user controls).